Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  “Grandma,” I said,

  “I got to be honest about the love medicine.”

  She listened. I knew from then on she would be listening to me the way I had listened to her before. I told her al out the turkey hearts and how I had them blessed. I told her what I used as love medicine was purely a fake, and then I said to her what my understanding brought me.

  “Love medicine ain’t what brings him back to you, Grandma.

  No, it’s something else. He loved you over time and distance, but be went off so quick he never got the chance to tell you how he loves you, how he doesn’t blame you, how he understands. It’s true feeling, not no magic. No supermarket heart could have brung him back.”

  She looked at me. She was seeing the years and days I had no way of knowing, and she didn’t believe me. I could tell this. Yet a look came on her face. It was like the look of mothers drinking sweetness from their children’s eyes. It was tenderness.

  “Lipsha, ” she said, “you was always my favorite.”

  She took the beads off the bedpost, where she kept them to say at night, and she told me to put out my hand. When I did this, she shut the beads inside of my fist and held them there a long minute, tight, so my hand hurt. I almost cried when she did this.

  I don’t really know why. Tears shot up behind my eyelids, and yet it was nothing. I didn’t understand, except her hand was so strong, squeezing mine, The earth was full of life and there were dandelions growing out the window, thick as thieves, already seeded, fat as big yellow plungers. She let my hand go. I got up. “I’ll go out and dig a few dandelions,” I told her.

  Outside, the sun was hot and heavy as a hand on my back. I felt it flow down my arms, out my fingers, arrowing through the ends of the fork into the earth. With every root I prized up there was return, as if I was kin to its secret lesson. The touch got stronger as I worked through the grassy afternoon. Uncurling from me like a seed out of the blackness where I was lost, the touch spread. The spiked leaves full of bitter mother’s milk. A buried root. A nuisance people dig up and throw in the sun to wither. A globe of frail seeds that’s indestructible.

  THE GOOD TEARS r a a ri (1983) LULU LAMAR TINE 1.

  No one ever understood my wild and secret ways. They used to say Lulu Lamartine was like a cat, loving no one, only purring to get what she wanted. But that’s not true. I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms. Sometimes I’d look out on my yard and the green leaves would be glowing. I’d see the oil slick on the wing of a grackle. I’d bear the wind rushing, rolling, like the far-off sound of waterfalls. Then I’d open my mouth wide, my ears wide, my heart, and I’d let everything inside.

  After some time I’d swing my door shut and walk back into the house with my eyes closed. I’d sit there like that in my house. I’d sit there with my eyes closed on beauty until it was time to make the pickle brine or smash the boiled berries or the boys came home. But for a while after letting the world in I would be full.

  I wouldn’t want anything more but what I had.

  And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear.

  I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.

  There were times.

  I’m going to tell you about the men. There were times I let them in just for being part of the world. I believe that angels in the body make us foreign to ourselves when touching. In this way I’d slip my body to earth, like a heavy sack, and for a few moments I would blend in with all that forced my heart. There was this one man I kept trying to forget. The handsome, distinguished man who burnt my house down.

  He did it after I got married the third and last time. The fire balded me completely. I doubt I’ll ever marry again.

  There’s no time for it anyway. By getting married to Nector Kashpaw I could have perhaps forgot him, but he dawdled. This way, that. He was my first love. We were young. Some nights ‘d talk behind the mission dance hall, and by midnight we’d we I I I have set the date.

  Then I wouldn’t see him as the day grew closer.

  At length I knew he loved, or at least was taken up with, someone else.

  After I had figured that out, I married a riffraff Morrissey for hurt and spite. Then I married again out of fondness. That made twice.

  All through this time I made a great pretense to ignore Nector Kashpaw.

  “Hello.” I’d see him in town. “How the world have you been?”

  And I’d have dreamed about sitting in his lap naked while the green dark rolled down. Or I’d have dreamed about his hands undoing everything.

  The one I married for fondness, Henry, died one winter on a dangerous train crossing. I always knew they should have put some automatic bars up out there. He stalled in the middle of a soybean field, or maybe the train did not blow its warning whistle. There’s really no way to ever tell. After the funeral, though, my secret wildness took me over.

  The more I think about it, I just never got Nector where I wanted him.

  At my mercy, I suppose, so that I could have my will. That’s how I got most of them, strange to say, for I was never any looker. It was just that I kept my youth. They couldn’t take that away. Even bald and half blinded as I am at present, I have my youth and my pleasure.

  I still let in the beauty of the world.

  It’s a sad world, though, when you can’t get love right even after trying it as many times as I have.

  After Henry’s funeral I came home and soaked in the pity of my eight sons, big boys, not a one of them the child of Henry in the factual sense. They were his spawn by force of habit, though.

  They kept me company through loneliness. And they would look aside and never notice what my wildness made me do.

  It doesn’t seem like twenty-six years ago, but indeed it was that long since I had my house on a beautiful hill that the tribe owned.

  Henry had raised it there. It was in that house, during the dead of night, that Kashpaw would visit me after Henry died. I kept a window open on the yard, and he always had himself a pocketful of meat scraps to feed our half-wild dogs. After he climbed in, when he touched me, I would smell that at first. A ripe animal-death smell. I kept a bowl of soap and water by the bed, for I was frightened to have that smell upon my body.

  It brought such pictures to mind.

  Nobody knows this. When I was seven I found the body of a dead man in the woods. I used to go out there and sweep my secret playhouse, clean my broken pots with leaves, tend to my garden of rocks and feathers. I would go out there and stay for hour upon hour. Nobody knew where to find me, or really looked very hard, anyway. They were used to my going off alone.

  My square of swept dirt in the woods is where I found the man.

  He laid across my front door as though to guard it from strangers, like a dog. He was so relaxed on his back, hat tipped on his face, that at first I did not think he was dead. I hid in a Juneberry bush and waited for him to wake, to stretch, get up and leave. He was an old ragged burn, dark and lean. His clothes were earthen, a dim cloth of dirt and holes. When he did not move for a long time I stepped out.

  I was never a patient thing. Bold and nervous, I took his hat off his face to wake him up.

  He had been staring into it. I mean the dark bowl of his little brown cap. And now he stared into an endless ceiling of sky and leaves. I knew how wrong it was. My body stacked before my mind made up the right words to describe him. Death was something I had never come upon until then, but let me tell you, I knew it when I saw it.

  Death was him. Staring into the ragged confinement of leaves. I put the cap back on his face. Then I left him, stepping over him. I went and sat in my playhouse to think.

  I kept my eyes on him. After I put his cap back on his face he seemed asleep again. I sat there for a
whole afternoon. He never moved. He never woke. He never seemed to know the passage of time.

  So after a while, I knew that he was mine.

  I never told anybody else he was there. He was the best thing I’d ever discovered. I went back to visit him the next morning while the dew was still wet on his clothes. I took the cap off his face and I saw how his eyes had changed, clouded like marbles. I touched the middle of his eye with the tip of a blade of grass, and he never blinked. It still surprised me, but I was less and less afraid. It seemed to me that he had come to my secret place for some reason. As young girls are, I was no different. I was curious.

  Well maybe I was more curious than most.

  He was so desperate poor that his clothing was nearly ripped off his body. The day went by. I cleaned up my house and then I cooked.

  Acorns, beetles, patty dirt. I made some kind of food that was even deader than him and put a spoonful between his lips.

  He had a strange jagged mouth. It was slightly open, as though it froze in the middle of an unspellable word.

  It was just that time of summer before school starts, before the leaves turn yellow and fall off overnight, before I would have to get on the government bus and go off to boarding school. Some children never did come home, I’d heard. It was ‘just that time of summer when your life smarts and itches. When even your clothing hurts.

  That’s why I did it. That’s why I did the worst.

  Holes, dirt, with nothing but an old red scarf for a pants belt.

  That was all he had on anyway. At first the cold hard stone of him surprised me. I only grazed him by accident. I did not really want to touch. I untied the knotted scarf, and his pants fell open from the waist. It was so easy I ‘jumped backward. His pants were worn and rotted. I can’t remember what I saw, or even how long I stayed. But soon after that the leaves came off the trees in yellow drifts, and every time I got close to my secret house a wall of smell rose up. I veered away. Then I went down to school on the government bus.

  It was on that bus that Lulu Lamartine cried all the tears she would ever cry in her life. I don’t know why, but after that they just dried up.

  Everyone who knows me will say I am a happy person. I go through life like a breeze. I try to greet the world without a grudge. I can beat the devil himself at cards because I play for the sheer amusement.

  I never worry half as much as other people.

  Things pass by. I suppose that Kashpaw was the one exception in my life.

  I clung to him like no other. I wanted to get the best of him.

  And I did. But for a time it seemed he had me over the barrel of his love. He came sneaking in my house with bad smells on his hands, and I made him wash before he touched me. But when he smelled like my lilac bath soap it would be blackness, deep blackness, and feathered insects with ruby eyes that watched us calmly in the dark. Nobody else ever knew of us. Nobody, if they don’t read this, ever will. We were that cautious. He had a wife who lost a boy and girl in fever, then took on too many children for anyone to count.

  It went on for five years like that, until well after my youngest boy was born. Half Kashpaw. No wonder Lyman had money sense. Perhaps it would have gone like that for countless years more. I didn’t want more than I could get, I was pretty well content. But then the politician showed his true stripe, a Mywhite, and the love knot we had welded between us unbent.

  All through my life I never did believe in human measurement.

  Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don’t try, just let it in. I don’t believe in numbering God’s creatures. I never let the United States census in my door, even though they say it’s good for Indians. Well, quote me. I say that every time they counted us they knew the precise number to get rid of.

  I believed this way even before those yellow-bearded Chinooks in their tie boots came to measure the land around Henry’s house. Henry Lamartine had never filed on or bought the land outright, but he lived there. He never took much stock in measurement, either. He knew like I did. If we’re going to measure land, let’s measure right. Every foot and inch you’re standing on, even if it’s on the top of the highest skyscraper, belongs to the Indians. That’s the real truth of the matter.

  Of course, since when were higher-ups interested in the truth?

  boom,.-, One morning bright and early we got a regulation on our doorstep. It was signed with Kashpaw’s hand as representing the tribal government. In turn, that was the red-apple court representing Uncle Sam.

  Kashpaw knocked that night.

  “Lulu, ” he said, “it don’t mean nothing. just let me in.”

  I stopped my ears and sicced the dogs on him. I was done with his lying hands.

  I was the blood that pounded in his temples. I was the knock of his heart. I was the needle of desire. I worked my way through his body and sewed him up. Yet he was willing to turn me from my house.

  Oh, they said they’d move it. Sure they did. How many times did we move? The Chippewas had started off way on the other side of the five great lakes. How we were shoved out on this lonesome knob of prairie my grandmother used to tell. It is too long a story to get into now.

  Let’s just say that I refused to move one foot farther west. I was very much intent to stay where I was.

  Around that time Henry’s brother, Beverly, appeared out of nowhere.

  He wanted to get married. “I been waiting for you all these years,” he said. I believed no such thing, but he seemed so lost and dazed it was as if he had been sleepwalking through his life up until the time he fell back into my arms. I had a fond spot in my heart for Beverly. He was a smooth, mild man, and I thought he wouldn’t give me any trouble once I had him. I told Kashpaw about the marriage the next time I saw him in town, as though it were nothing to him.

  “I’m tying the knot again. You know Bev Lamartine, from the Cities?”

  Well Nector’s long face went longer. His eyes went blacker.

  And what I saw in their hate pits made me cross my breast before I turned away. A love so strong brews the same strength of hate.

  “I’ll kill him,” the eyes said. “Or else I’ll kill you.”

  I thought his passion would die down. We never do one-half the things we threaten. But that was my mistaken judgment, for I hadn’t reckoned on the tribal mob.

  Indian against Indian, that’s how the government’s money offer made us act. Here was the government Indians ordering their own people off the land of their forefathers to build a modern factory To make it worse, it was a factory that made equipment of false value. Keepsake things like bangle beads and plastic war clubs. A load of foolishness, that was.

  Dreamstuff. I used that word in the speech when I stood up to the tribal council. I came before them. Kashpaw recognized me.

  “Mrs. Lamartine has the floor,” he said.

  “She’s had the floor and half the council on it,” I heard a whispered voice say. But I paid no heed and kept my head up proud.

  I spoke. I looked deep through Nector Kashpaw and let my voice rove through the postcard Indian handsomeness of his personal dream stuff

  Sweat had darkened patches on his workshirt beneath the arms. Perhaps he feared that I would tell how each night I made him wash his hands before he touched me, or what the insects saw us do with their blood-red eyes.

  It was the stuff of dreams, I said. The cheap false longing that makes your money-grubbing tongues hang out. The United States government throws crumbs on the floor, and you go down so far to lick up those dollars that you turn your own people off the land. I got mad. “What’s that but merde?” I yelled at them.

  “False value!” I said to them that this tomahawk factory mocked us all.

  “She dyes her hair,” I heard a voice behind me whisper. “Gray at the roots.”

  “The Lamartines lived all their life on that land,” I said. “The Lamartine family deserves
to stay.”

  A voice clapped itself over the mouth. But not before I heard it “Bitch!” By then there were near a hundred people in the cry, I room.

  “All those Lamartine sons by different fathers.” That voice was loud enough to be heard. And then it said: “Ain’t the youngest Nector’s?” So I had no choice in what I did. I turned around.

  I looked straight out at the people sitting in their unfolded chairs.

  There was many a man who found something to study on the floor.

  “I’ll name all of them,” I offered in a very soft voice. “The fathers I’ll point them out for you right here.”

  There was silence, in which a motion was made from the floor.

  “Restitution for Lamartine,” they said. “Monetary settlement.”

  Relief blew through the room, but I would have none of it.

  “We don’t want money,” I said. “We’re staying on our land.”

  Every one of them could see it in my face. They saw me clear.

  Before I’d move the Lamartine household I’d hit the tribe with a fistful of paternity suits that would make their heads spin. Some of them had forgotten until then that I’d even had their son. Still others must have wondered. I could see the back neck hair on the wives all over that room prickle. So it was. Eventually the meeting broke up. But to where? For it was soon after that Henry’s house burnt down.

  I wish that Bev had gotten back from Minneapolis and stopped Kashpaw.

  Here was the strange thing. Bev and me were married by a judge in the presence of the boys. Then a week later he told me he already had a wife. I put my foot down, of course. I can be a hard woman when I’m pressed. I told him to go-back there and get a divorce. I sent Gerry, my grownup baby tough as nails, in the car with him to the Cities in order to make certain that he dumped her. Whoever she was, I needed Bev worse.