Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  So Grandpa Kashpaw just opened my eyes a little there. Was there any sense relying on a God whose ears was stopped? just like the government? I says then, right off, maybe we got nothing but ourselves.

  And that’s not much, just personally speaking. I know I don’t got the cold hard potatoes it takes to understand everything.

  Still, there’s things I’d like to do. For instance, I’d like to help some people like my Grandpa and Grandma Kashpaw get back some happiness within the tail ends of their lives.

  I told you once before I couldn’t see my way clear to putting the direct touch on Grandpa’s mind, and I kept my moral there, but something soon happened to make me think a little bit of mental adjustment wouldn’t do him and the rest of us no harm.

  It was after we saw him one afternoon in the sunshine court yard of the Senior Citizens with Lulu Lamartine. Grandpa used to like to dig there.

  He had his little dandelion fork out, and he was prying up them dandelions right and left while Lamartme watched him.

  “He’s scratching up the dirt, all right,” said Grandma, watching Lamartine watch Grandpa out the window.

  Now Lamartine was about half the considerable size of Grandma, but you would never think of sizes anyway. They were different in an even more noticeable way. It was the difference between a house fixed up with paint and picky fence, and a house left to weather away into the soft earth, is what I’m saying.

  Urnartine was ‘acked up, latticed, shuttered, and vinyl sided, while Grandma sagged and bulged on her slipped foundations and let her hair go the silver gray of rain-dried lumber, Right now, she eyed the Lamartine’s pert flowery dress with such a look it despaired me. I knew what this could lead to with Grandma.

  Alterating tongue storms and rock-hard silences was hard on a man, even one who didn’t notice, like Grandpa. So I went fetching him.

  But he was gone when I popped through the little screen door that led out on the courtyard. There was nobody out there either, to point which way they went. just the dandelion fork quibbling upright in the ground.

  That gave me an idea. I snookered over to the Lamartine’s door and I listened in first, then knocked. But nobody. So I went walking through the lounges and around the card tables. Still nobody.

  Finally it was my touch that led me to the laundry room. I cracked the door. I went in. There they were, And he was really loving her up good, boy, and she was going hell for leather. Sheets was flapping on the lines above, and washcloths, pillowcases, shirts was also flying through the air, for they was trying to clear out a place for themselves in a high heaped but shallow laundry cart. The washers and the dryers was all on, chock full of quarters, shaking and moaning. I couldn’t hear what Grandpa and the Lamartine was billing and cooing, and they couldn’t hear me.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I went inside and shut the door.

  The Lamartine wore a big curly light-brown wig. Looked like one of them squeaky little white-people dogs. Poodles they call them.

  Anyway, that wig is what saved us from the-worse. For I could hardly shout and tell them I was in there, no more could I try and grab him.

  I was trapped where I was. There was nothing I could really do but hold the door shut. I was scared of somebody else upsetting in and really getting an eyeful. Turned out though, in the heat of the clinch, as I was trying to avert my eyes you see, the Lamartine’s curly wig ‘jumped off her head. And if you ever been in the midst of something and had a big change like that occur in the someone, you can’t help know how it devastates your basic urges. Not only that, but her wig was almost with a life of its own. Grandpa’s eyes were bugging at the change already, and swear to God if the thing didn’t rear up and pop him in the face like it was going to start something. He scrambled up, Grandpa did, and the Lamartine jumped up after him all addled looking. They just stared at each other, huffing and puffing, with quizzical expression. The surprise seemed to drive all sense completely out of Grandpa’s mind.

  “The letter was what started the fire,” he said. I never would have done it.”

  “What letter?” said the Lamartine. She was stiff-necked now, and elegant, even bald, like some alien queen. I gave her back the wig.

  The Lamartine replaced it on her head, and whenever I saw her after that, I couldn’t help thinking of her bald, with special powers, as if from another planet.

  “That was a close call,” I said to Grandpa after she had left.

  But I think he had already forgot the incident. He just stood there all quiet and thoughtful. You really wouldn’t think he was crazy.

  He looked like he was just about to say something imp or bomb.-, tant, explaining himself He said something, all right, but it didn’t have nothing to do with anything that made sense.

  He wondered where the heck he put his dandelion fork. That’s when I decided about the mental adjustment.

  Now what was mostly our problem was not so much that he was not all there, but that what was there of him often hankered after Lamartine.

  If we could put a stop to that, I thought, we might be getting someplace. But here, see, my touch was of no use.

  For what could I snap my fingers at to make him faithful to Grandma?

  Like the quality of staying power, this faithfulness was invisible. I know it’s something that you got to acquire, but I never known where from. Maybe there’s no rhyme or reason to it, like my getting the touch, and then again maybe it’s a kind of magic.

  It was Grandma Kashpaw who thought of it in the end. She knows things.

  Although she will not admit she has a scrap of Indian blood in her, there’s no doubt in my mind she’s got some Chippewa. How else would you explain the way she’ll be sitting there, in front of her TV story, rocking in herprinchair and suddenly she turns on me, her brown eyes hard as lake-bed flint.

  “Lipsha Morrissey,” she’ll say, “you went out last night and got drunk.

  ” How did she know that? I’ll hardly remember it myself. Then she’ll say she just had a feeling or ache in the scar of her hand or a creak in her shoulder. She is constantly being told things by little aggravations in her joints or by her household appliances. One time she told Gordie never to ride with a crazy Lamartine boy.

  She had seen something in the polished-up tin of her bread toaster.

  So he didn’t. Sure enough, the time came we heard how Lyman and Henry went out of control in their car, ending up in the river. Lyman swam to the top, but Henry never made it.

  Thanks to Grandma’s toaster, Gordie was probably spared.

  hear what Grandpa and the Larnartine was billing and cooing, and they couldn’t hear me.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I went inside and shut the door.

  The Larnartine wore a big curly light-brown wig. Looked like one of them squeaky little white-people dogs. Poodles they call them.

  Anyway, that wig is what saved us from the-worse. For I could hardly shout and tell them I was in there, no more could I try and grab him.

  I was trapped where I was. There was nothing I could really do but hold the door shut. I was scared of somebody else upsetting in and really getting an eyeful. Turned out though, in the heat of the clinch, as I was trying to avert my eyes you see, the Larnartine’s curly wig jumped off her head. And if you ever been in the midst of something and had a big change like that occur in the someone, you can’t help know how it devastates your basic urges. Not only that, but her wig was almost with a life of its own. Grandpa’s eyes were bugging at the change already, and swear to God if the thing didn’t rear up and pop him in the face like it was going to start something. He scrambled up, Grandpa did, and the Larnartine jumped up after him all addled looking. They just stared at each other, huffing and puffing, with quizzical expression. The surprise seemed to drive all sense completely out of Grandpa’s mind.

  “The letter was what started the fire,” he said. I never would have done it.”

  “What letter?” said the Lamartine. She was stiff-necked now,
and elegant, even bald, like some alien queen. I gave her back the wig.

  The Larnartine replaced it on her head, and whenever I saw her after that, I couldn’t help thinking of her bald, with special powers, as if from another planet.

  “That was a close call,” I said to Grandpa after she had left.

  But I think he had already forgot the incident. He just stood there all quiet and thoughtful. You really wouldn’t think he was crazy.

  He looked like he was just about to say something imp or Someplace in thelblood Grandma Kasbpaw knows things. She also remembers things, I found. She keeps things filed away She’s got a memory like them video games that don’t forget your score. One reason she remembers so many details about the trouble I gave her in early life is so she can flash back her total when she needs to.

  Like now. Take the love medicine. I don’t know where she remembered that from. It came tumbling from her mind like an asteroid off the corner of the screen.

  Of course she starts out by mentioning the time I had this ‘dent in church and did she leave me there with wet overacci halls? No she didn’t. And ain’t I glad? Yes I am. Now what you want now, Grandma?

  But when she mentions them love medicines, I feel my back prickle at the danger. These love medicines is something of an old Chippewa specialty.

  No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicines is not for the layman to handle. You don’t just go out and get one without paying for it. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You got to think it over. Choose the right one. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.

  So anyhow, I said to Grandma I’d give this love medicine some thought. I knew the best thing was to go ask a specialist like Old Man Pillager, who lives up in a tangle of bush and never shows himself.

  But the truth is I was afraid of him, like everyone else. He was known for putting the twisted mouth on people, seizing up their hearts. Old Man Pillager was serious business, and I have always thought it best to steer clear of that whenever I could. That’s why I took the powers in my own hands. That’s why I did what I could.

  I put my whole mentality to it, nothing held back. After a while I started to remember things I’d heard gossiped over.

  I heard of this person once who carried a charm of seeds that boom.-, looked like baby pearls. They was attracted to a metal knife, which made them powerful. But I didn’t know where them seeds grew.

  Another love charm I heard about I couldn’t go along with, because how was I suppose to catch frogs in the act, which it required.

  Them little creatures is slippery and fast. And then the power fullest of all, the most extreme, involved nail clips and such. I wasn’t anywhere near asking Grandma to provide me all the little body bits that this last love recipe called for. I went walking around for days ‘just trying to think up something that would work.

  Well I got it. If it hadn’t been the early fall of the year, I never would have got it. But I was sitting underneath a tree one day down near the school just watching people’s feet go by when something tells me, look up! Look up! So I look up, and I see two honkers, Canada geese, the kind with little masks on their faces, a bird what mates for life. I see them flying right over my head naturally preparing to land in some slough on the reservation, which they certainly won’t get off of alive.

  It hits me, anyway. Them geese, they mate for life. And I think to myself, ‘just what if I went out and got a pair? And just what if I fed some part-say the goose heart-of the female to Grandma and Grandpa ate the other heart? Wouldn’t that work?

  Maybe it’s all invisible, and then maybe again it’s magic. Love is a stony road. We know that for sure. If it’s true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say, then we’d be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn’t harm nobody anyway.

  I thought it was worth my effort, and Grandma Kashpaw thought so, too.

  She had always known a good idea when she heard one. She borrowed me Grandpa’s gun.

  So I went out to this particular slough, maybe the exact same slough I never got thrown in by my mother, thanks to Grandma Kashpaw, and I hunched down in a good comfortable pile of rushes. I got my gun loaded up. I ate a few of these soft baloney sandwiches Grandma made me for lunch. And then I waited.

  The cattails blown back and forth above my head. Them stringy blue herons was spearing up their prey. The thing I know how to do best in this world, the thing I been training for all my life, is to wait.

  Sitting there and sitting there was no hardship on me. I got to thinking about some funny things that happened. There was this one time that Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it, flown up inside her dress and got lost within there. I recalled her running out into the hallway trying to yell something, shaking. She was doing a right good jig there, cutting the rug for sure, and the thing is it never flown out. To this day people speculate where it went. They fear she might perhaps of crushed it in her corsets. It sure hasn’t ever yet been seen alive. I thought of funny things for a while, but then I used them up, and strange things that happened started weaseling their way into my mind, I got to thinking quite naturally of the Larriartine’s cousin named Wristwatch.

  I never knew what his real name was. They called him Wristwatch because he got his father’s broken wristwatch as a young boy when his father passed on. Never in his whole life did Wristwatch take his father’s watch off. He didn’t if it worked, although after a while he got sensitive when care people asked what time it was, teasing him. He often put it to his ear like he was listening to the tick. But it was broken for good and forever, people said so, at least that’s what they thought.

  Well I saw Wristwatch smoking in his pickup one afternoon and by nine that evening he was dead.

  He died sitting at the Larriartine’s table, too. As she told it, Wristwatch had just eaten himself a good-size dinner and she said would he take seconds on the hot dish when he fell over to the floor. They turnt him over. He was gone. But here’s the strange thing: when the Senior Citizen’s orderly took the pulse he noticed that the wristwatch Wristwatch wore was now working. The moment he died the wristwatch started keeping perfect time.

  They buried him with the watch still ticking on his arm.

  I got to thinking. What if some grave diggers dug up Wristwatch’s casket in two hundred years and that watch was still going? I thought what question they would ask and it was this: Whose hand wound it?

  I started shaking like a piece of grass at just the thought.

  Not to get off the subject or nothing. I was still hunkered in the slough. It was passing late into the afternoon and still no honkers had touched down. Now I don’t need to tell you that the waiting did not get to me, it was the chill. The rushes was very soft, but damp.

  I was getting cold and debating to leave, when they landed. Two geese swimming here and there as big as life, looking deep into each other’s little pinhole eyes. just the ones I was looking for. So I lifted Grandpa’s gun to my shoulder and I aimed perfectly, and blam! Manz! I delivered two accurate shots. But the thing is, them shots missed. I couldn’t hardly believe it. Whether it was that the stock had warped or the barrel got bent some ways I don’t quite know, but anyway them geese flown off into the dim sky, and Lipsha Morrissey was left there in the rushes with evening fallen and his two cold hands empty. He had before him just the prospect of another day of bone-cracking chill in them rushes, and the thought of it got him depressed.

  Now it isn’t my style, in no way, to get depressed.

  So I said to myself, Lipsha Morrissey, you’re a happy SOB.

  who could be covered up with weeds by now down at the bottom of this slough, but instead you’re alive to tell the tale. You might have problems in life, but you still got the touch. You got the power, Lipsha Morrissey. Can’t argue that. So put your mind to it and figure out how not to be depressed.


  I took my advice. I put my mind to it. But I never saw at the time how my thoughts led me astray toward a tragic outcome none could have known.

  I ignored all the danger, all the limits,

  “A

  for I was tired of sitting in the slough and my feet were numb. My face was aching. I was chilled, so I played with fire. I told myself love medicine was simple. I told myself the old superstitions was just that-strange beliefs. I told myself to take the ten dollars Mary MacDonald had paid me for putting the touch on her arthritis joint, and the other five I hadn’t spent yet from winning bingo last Thursday. I told myself to go down to the Ked Owl store.

  And here is what I did that made the medicine backfire. I took

  “I

  shortcut. I looked at birds that was dead and froze.

  an evi All right. So now I guess you will say,

  “Slap a malpractice suit on Lipsha Morrissey.”

  I heard of those suits. I used to think it was a color clothing quack doctors had to wear so you could tell them from the good ones.

  Now I know better that it’s law.

  As I walked back from the Red Owl with the rock-hard, heavy turkeys, I argued to myself about malpractice. I thought of faith. I thought to myself that faith could be called belief against the odds and whether or not there’s any proof. How does that sound? I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that’s not saying it’s not there. And that is faith for you. It’s belief even when the goods don’t deliver. Higher Power makes promises we all know they can’t back up, but anybody ever go and slap an old malpractice suit on God? Or the U. S. government? No they don’t. Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through. So what I’m heading at is this. I finally convinced myself that the real actual power to the love medicine was not the goose heart itself but the faith in the cure.

  I didn’t believe it, I knew it was wrong, but by then I had waded so far into my lie I was stuck there. And then I went one step further.

  The next day, I cleaned the hearts away from the paper pack—dad ages of gizzards inside the turkeys. Then I wrapped them hearts with a clean hankie and brung them both to get blessed up at the mission. I wanted to get official blessings from the priest, but when Father answered the door to the rectory, wiping his hands on a little towel, I could tell he was a busy man.