Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

“I come to take confession. I need to confess it.

  She stood against the wall, next to the window, arms folded against her chest.

  “I’m not a priest.”

  “Bless me Father for I have sinned.

  The voice was blurred, stupidly childish.

  “I’ll go get a priest for you,” she said.

  “It’s been, shit, ten years since my last confession.” He laughed, then he coughed.

  The wind blew up, suddenly, a cold gust from the garden, and a different, specifically evil, smell came from his clothes, along with the smell of something un definably worse.

  “What do you want?” she said for the third time.

  He banged the screen with his elbow. He turned, hugging himself, pounding his arms with his fists, and threw his forehead against the window frame. He was weeping, she recognized at last. This was the soundless violent way that this particular man wept.

  “All right,” she said, knowing and not wanting to know. It would be a very bad thing that he had to say. “Tell me.”

  And then he tried to tell her, stumbling and stuttering, about the car and the crowbar and how he’d killed June.

  A low humming tension collected In the dark around Mary Martin as she sorted through his Tumbled story. He could not stop talking. He went on and on. Finally it became real for her also.

  He had ‘just now killed his wife. Her throat went dry. She held the clarinet across her chest with both hands, fingers pressed on the warm valves and ebony. She listened. Clarity. She could not think. The word fell into her mind, but her mind was not clear.

  The metal valve caps were silky smooth. She thought she smelled the blood on him. A knot of sickness formed in her stomach and uncurled, rising in her throat, burning. She wanted urgently to get away from him and sleep. She needed to lie down.

  “Stop,” she begged. Her throat closed. He fell silent on her word.

  But it was too late. She saw the woman clubbed, distinctly heard the bar smash down, saw the vivid blood.

  Her fists were tight knobs. Tears had filled the slight cup where her glasses frames touched her cheeks, and they leaked straight down from there along the corners of her mouth. The tears dropped on her hands, She had to say something.

  “Are you sure that she’s dead?”

  His silence told her that he was. He seemed to have relaxed, breathing easier, as if telling her had removed some of the burden _,dig from him already She heard him fumble through his clothes. A match snicked. There was a brief glare of light, and then tobacco curled faintly through the window and disappeared in the black room.

  Something lit furiously in Mary Martin when she heard him take the smoke in with a grateful sigh. Light pinwheeled behind her eyes, red and jagged, giving off a tide of heat that swept her to the window.

  For what she did not know.

  Now she stood, trembling, inches from him and spoke into the shadow of his face.

  “Where is she?”

  “Outside in my car.”

  “Take me to see her then,” said Mary Martin.

  To get to the portico of the back entryway, she had to pass through the dark chapel. A candle burned, soft orange in its jar, before the small wooden sacristy where the host was kept. She walked by without genuflecting or making the sign of the cross, then made herself stop and go back. The calm of the orange glow reproached her. But after she had bent her knee and crossed herself she felt no different. She left her clarinet on one of the chairs and walked out to unlatch the back door.

  She stepped into the coot night air. He had gone before her and was already partway down the path walking bowlegged for balance. She stamped out the glowing cigarette stub he flipped in the grass. He stopped twice, giving in to a spasm of rolling shivers against a drainpipe then again where the gate opened out to the front yard. His car was parked in the lot, askew. She saw it right off-a long, low slung green car directly lit by the yard light. He stopped at the edge of the gravel lot, swaying slightly, and put his hand to his mouth.

  She had not seen his face yet, and now, as she stood beside him, forced herself to look, to find something, before she went to the car, that would make it impossible to hate him.

  But his face was the puckered, dull mask of a drunk, and she turned quickly away. She walked over to the car, leaving him where he stood.

  The backseat was lit from one side, she saw, and so she walked up to it, taking deep breaths before she bent and gazed through the window.

  Mary Martin had prepared herself so strictly for the sight of a woman’s body that the animal jolted her perhaps more than if the woman had been there. At the first sight of it, so strange and awful, a loud cackle came from her mouth. Her legs sagged, suddenly old, and a fainting surge of weakness spread through her. She managed to open the door.

  There was no mistake-dun flanks, flag tail, curled legs, and lolling head, The yard light showed it clearly. But she had to believe. She bent into the car, put her hands straight out, and lowered them carefully onto the deer. The flesh was stiff, but the short hair seemed warm and alive. The smell hit her-the same frightening smell that had been on the man-some death musk that deer give off, acrid and burning and final. Suddenly and without warning, like her chest were cracking, the weeping broke her. It came out of heTwith hard violence, loud in her ears, a wild burst of sounds that emptied her.

  When it was over, she found herself in the backseat wedged against the animal’s body.

  Night was lifting. The sky was blue gray. She thought she could smell the dew in the dust and silence. Then, almost dreamily, she shook her head toward the light, blank for a moment as a waking child.

  She heard the wailing voice, an echo of hers, and remembered the man at the edge of the gravel lot.

  She crawled from the car, shook the cramps from her legs, and started toward him. Her hands made gestures in the air, but no sound came from her mouth. When he saw that she was coming at him he stopped in the middle of a bawl. He stiffened, windilled his arms, and stumbled backward in a cardboard fright.

  Lights were on behind him in the convent. Mary Martin began to run.

  He whirled to all sides, darting glances, then fled with incredible quickness back along the sides of the building to the long yard where there were orchards, planted pines, then the reservation grass and woods.

  She followed him, calling now, into the apple trees but lost him there, and all that morning, while they waited for the orderlies and the tribal police to come with cuffing and litters and a court order, they heard him crying like a drowned person, howling in the open fields.

  how_ LOVE MEDICINE r (1982)

  LJPSHA MORRISSEY

  I never really done much with my life, I suppose. I never had a television. Grandma Kashpaw had one inside her apartment at the Senior Citizens, so I used to go there and watch my favorite shows. For a while she used to call me the biggest waste on the reservation and hark back to how she saved me from my own mother, who wanted to tie me in a potato sack and throw me in a slough. Sure, I was grateful to Grandma Kashpaw for saving me like that, for raising me, but gratitude gets old.

  After a while, stale. I had to stop thanking her. One day I told her I had paid her back in full by staying at her beck and call.

  I’d do anything for Grandma. She knew that. Besides, I took care of Grandpa like nobody else could, on account of what a handful he’d gotten to be.

  But that was nothing. I know the tricks of mind and body in side out without ever having trained for it, because I got the touch.

  It’s a thing you got to be born with. I got secrets in my hands that nobody ever knew to ask. Take Grandma Kashpaw with her tired veins all knotted up in her legs like clumps of blue

  “Is. I take my fingers and I snap them on the knots. The niedisnal cine flows out of me. The touch.

  I run my fingers up the maps of those rivers of veins or I knock very gentle above their hearts or I make a circling motion on their stomachs, and it helps them.

  They f
eel much better. Some women pay me five dollars.

  I couldn’t do the touch for Grandpa, though. He was a hard nut. You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where. There is this woman here, “Lulu Lamartine, who always had a thing for Grandpa.

  She loved him since she was a girl and always said he was a genius.

  Now she says that his mind got so full it exploded.

  How can I doubt that? I know the feeling when your mental power builds up too far. I always used to say that’s why the Indians got drunk. Even statistically we’re the smartest people on the earth.

  Anyhow with Grandpa I couldn’t hardly believe it, because all my youth he stood out as a hero to me. When he started getting toward second childhood he went through different moods. He would stand in the woods and cry at the top of his shirt. It scared me, scared everyone, Grandma worst of all.

  Yet He was so smart-do you believe W-that he knew he was getting foolish.

  He said so. He told me that December I failed school and come back on the train to Hoopdance. I didn’t have nowhere else to go. He picked me up there and he said it straight out: “I’m getting into my second childhood.” And then he said something else I still remember: “I been chosen for it. I couldn’t say no.” So I figure that a man so smart all his life-tribal chairman and the star of movies and even pictured in the statehouse and on cans of snuff-would know what he’s doing by saying yes. I think he was called to second childhood like anybody else gets a call for the priesthood or the army or whatever. So I really did not listen too hard when the doctor said this was some kind of disease old people got eating too much sugar. You just can’t tell me that a man who went to Washington and gave them bureaucrats what for could lose his mind from eating too much Milky Way. No, he put second childhood on himself Behind those songs he sings out in the middle of Mass, and back of those stories that everybody knows by heart, Grandpa is thinking hard about life. I know the feeling. Sometimes I’ll throw up a smokescreen to think behind.

  I’ll hitch up to Winnipeg and play the Space Invaders for six hours, but all the time there and back I will be thinking some fairly deep thoughts that surprise even me, and I’m used to it. As for him, if it was just the thoughts there wouldn’t be no problem.

  Smokescreen is what irritates the social structure, see, and Grandpa has done things that ‘just distract people to the point they want to throw him in the cookie Jar where they keep the mentally insane. He’s far from that, I know for sure, but even Grandma had trouble keeping her patience once he started sneaking off to Lamartine’s place. He’s not supposed to have his candy, and Lulu feeds it to him. That’s one of the reasons why he goes.

  Grandma tried to get me to put the touch on Grandpa soon after he began stepping out. I didn’t want to, but before Grandma started telling me again what a bad state my bare behind was in when she first took me home, I thought I should at least pretend.

  I put my hands on either slide of Grandpa’s head. You wouldn’t look at him and say he was crazy. He’s a fine figure of a man, as Lamartine would say, with all his hair and half his teeth, a beak like a hawk, and cheeks like the blades of a hatchet. They put his picture on all the tourist guides to North Dakota and even copied his face for artistic paintings. I guess you could call him a monument all of himself. He s,started grinning when I put my hands on his templates, and I knew right then he knew how come I touched him. I knew the smokescreen was going to fall.

  And I was right: just for a moment it fell.

  “Let’s pitch whoopee,” he said across my shoulder to Grandma.

  They don’t use that expression much around here anymore, but for damn sure it must have meant something. It got her goat right quick.

  She threw my hands off his head herself and stood in front of him, overmatching him pound for pound, and taller too, for she had a growth spurt in middle age while he had shrunk, so now the length and breadth of her surpassed him. She glared up and spoke her piece into his face about how he was off at all hours spoke her piece into his racc avout torricatting and chasing Lamartine again and making a damn old fool of himself

  “And you got no more whoopee to pitch anymore anyhow!”

  “She yelled at last, surprising me so my jaw ‘just dropped, for us kids all had pretended for so long that those rustling sounds we heard from their side of the room at night never happened. She sure had pretended it, up till now, anyway. I saw that tears were in her eyes.

  And that’s when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him. And it gave me a real shock to the system. You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

  She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead.

  And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind.

  So I didn’t know what to do. I was in a laundry then. They was like parents to me, the way they had took me home and reared PI me. I could see her point for wanting to get him back the way he was so at least she could argue with him, sleep with him, not be shamed out by Larriartine.

  She’d always love him. That hit me like a ton of bricks.

  For one whole day I felt this odd feeling that cramped my hands. When you have the touch, that’s where longing gets you. I never loved like that. It made me feel all inspired to see them fight, and I wanted to go out and find a woman who I would love until one of us died or went crazy. But I’m not like that really. From time to time I heal a person all up good inside, however when it comes to the long shot I doubt that I got staying power.

  And you need that, staying power, going out to love somebody.

  I knew this quality was not going to jump on me with no effort.

  So I turned my thoughts back to Grandma and Grandpa. I felt her side of it with my hands and my tangled guts, and I felt his ‘de of it within the stretch of my mentality. He had gone out to si I I I lunch one day and never came back. He was fishing in the middle of Lake Turcot. And there was big thoughts on his line, and he kept throwing them back for even bigger ones that would explain to him, say, the meaning of how we got here and why we have to leave so soon. All in all, I could not see myself treating Grandpa with the touch, bringing him back, when the real part of him had chose to be off thinking somewhere. It was only the rest of him that stayed around causing trouble, after all, and we could handle most of it without any problem.

  Besides, it was hard to argue with his reasons for doing some things.

  Take Holy Mass. I used to go there just every so often, when I got frustrated mostly, because even though I know the Higher Power dwells everyplace, there’s something very calming about the cool greenish inside of our mission. Or so I thought, anyway. Grandpa was the one who stripped off my delusions in this matter, for it was he who busted right through what Father Upsala calls the sacred serenity of the place.

  We filed in that time. Me and Grandpa. We sat down in our book.-, pews. Then the rosary got started up pre-Mass and that’s when Grandpa filled up his chest and opened his mouth and belted out them words.

  HAIL MARIE FULL OF GRACE.

  He had a powerful set of lungs.

  And he kept on like that. He did not let up. He hollered and he yelled them prayers, and I guess people was used to him by now, because they only muttered theirs and did not quit and gawk like I did. I was getting red-faced, I admit. I give him the elbow once or twice, but that wasn’t nothing to him. He kept on. He shrieked to heaven and he pleaded like a movie actor and he pounded his chest like Tarzan in the Lord I Am Not Worthies. I thought he might hurt himself Then after a while I guess I got used to it, and that’s when I wondered: how come?

  So afterwards I out and asked him. “How come? How come you yelled?”

  “God don’t hear me otherwise,” said G
randpa Kashpaw.

  I sweat. I broke right into a little cold sweat at my hairline because I knew this was perfectly right and for years not one damn other person had noticed it. God’s been going deaf Since the Old Testament, God’s been deafening up on us. I read, see.

  Besides the dictionary, which I’m constantly in use of, I had this Bible once. I read it. I found -there was discrepancies between then and now. It struck me. Here God used to raineth bread from clouds, smite the Phillipines, sling fire down on red-light districts where people got stabbed. He even appeared in person every once in a while.

  God used to pay attention, is what I’m saying.

  Now there’s your God in the Old Testament and there is Chippewa Gods as well. Indian Gods, good and bad, like tricky Nanabozho or the water monster, Missepeshu, who lives over in Lake Turcot. That water monster was the last God I ever heard to appear. It had a weakness for young girls and grabbed one of the Blues off her rowboat. She got to shore all right, but only after Add MEL Attacked this monster had its way with her. She’s an old lady now. Old Lady Blue. She still won’t let her family fish that lake.

  Our Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least they come around. They’ll do a favor if you ask them right. You don’t have to yell. But you do have to know, like I said, how to ask in the right way. That makes problems, because to ask proper was an art that was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground. Even now, I have to wonder if Higher Power turned it back, if we got to yell, or if we ‘just don’t speak its language.

  I looked around me. How else could I explain what all I bad seen in my short life-King smashing his fist in things, Gordie drinking himself down to the Bismarck hospitals, or Aunt June left by a white man to wander off in the snow. How else to explain the times my touch don’t work, and farther back, to the old time Indians who was swept away in the outright germ warfare and dirty-dog killing of the whites. In those times, us Indians was so much kindlier than now.

  We took them in.

  Oh yes, I’m bitter as an old cutworm just thinking of how they done to us and doing still.