Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

Somehow in falling I grip the puffed sleeve of her blouse and tear it from her shoulder.

There I am, on the ground, sprawled and burdened by the geese, clutching that sky-color bit of cloth. I think at first she will do me more damage with her shoes. But she just stands glaring down on me, rail-tough and pale as birch, her face loose and raging beneath the white cloth. I think that now the tears will spurt out. She will sob.

But Marie is the kind of tree that doubles back and springs up, whips singing.

She bends over lightly and snatches the sleeve from my grip.

“Lay there you ugly sonofabitch,” she says.

I never answer, never say one word, just surge forward, knock dd her: over and roll on top of her and hold her pinned down underneath my whole length.

“Now we’ll talk, skinny white girl, dirty Lazarre!” I yell in her face.

The geese are to my advantage now; their weight on my arms helps pin her; their dead wings flap around us; their necks loll, and their black eyes stare, frozen. But Marie is not the kind of girl to act frightened of a few dead geese.

She stares into my eyes, furious and silent, her lips clenched white.

“Just give me that pillowcase,” I say, “and I’ll let you go. I’m gonna bring that cloth back to the nuns.”

She burns up at me with such fierceness, then, that I think she hasn’t understood what a little thing I am asking. Her eyes are tense and wild, animal eyes. My neck chills.

“There now,” I say in a more reasonable voice, “quit clutching it and I’ll let you up and go. You shouldn’t have stole it.”

“Stole it!” she spits. “Stole!”

Her mouth drops wide open. If I want I could look all the way down her throat. Then she makes an odd rasp file noise, cawing like a crow.

She is laughing! It is too much. The Lazarre is laughing in my face!

“Stop that.” I put my hand across her mouth. Her slick white teeth click, harmless, against my palm, but I am not satisfied.

“Lemme up,” she mumbles.

“No,” I say.

She lays still, then goes stiller. I look into her eyes and see the hard tears have frozen in the corners. She moves her legs. I keep her down. Something happens. The bones of her hips lock to either side’ of my hips, and I am held in a light vise. I stiffen like I am shocked. It hits me then I am lying full length across a woman, not a girl. Her breasts graze my chest, soft and pointed. I bow cannot help but lower myself the slightest bit to feel them better.

And then I am caught. I give way. I cannot help myself, because, to my everlasting wonder, Marie is all tight plush acceptance, graceful movements, little ‘abs that lead me underneath her skirt where she is slick, warm, silk.

When I come back, and when I look down on her, I know how badly I have been weakened. Her tongue flattens against my palm. I know that when I take my hand away the girl will smile, because somehow I have been beaten at what I started on this hill. And sure enough, when I take my hand away she speaks.

“I’ve had better.”

I know that isn’t true, that I was just now the first, and I can even hear the, shake in her voice, but that makes no difference.

She scares me. I scramble away from her, holding the geese in front.

Although she is just a little girl knocked down in the dirt, she sits up, smooth as you please, fixes the black skirt over her knees, rearranges the pillowcase tied around her hand.

We are unsheltered by bushes. Anyone could have seen us.

I glance around. On the hill, the windows dark in the whitewashed brick seem to harbor a thousand holy eyes widening and narrowing.

How could I? It is then I panic, mouth hanging open, all but certain.

They saw! I can hardly believe what I have done.

Marie is watching me. She sees me swing blind to the white face of the convent. She knows exactly what is going through my mind.

“I hope they saw it,” she says in the crow’s rasp.

I shut my mouth, then open it, then shut my mouth again.

Who is this girl? I feel my breath failing like a stupid fish in the airless space around her. I lose control.

“I never did!” I shout, breaking my voice. I whirl to her. She is looking at the geese I hold in front to hide my shame. I speak wildly.

“A — all from.

“You made me! You forced me!”

“I made you!” She laughs and shakes her hand, letting the pillowcase drop clear so that I can see the ugly wound.

“I didn’t make you do anything,” she says.

Her hand looks bad, cut and swollen, and it has not been washed.

Even afraid as I am, I cannot help but feel how bad her hand must hurt and throb. Thinking this causes a small pain to shoot through my own hand. The girl’s hand must have hurt when I threw her on the ground, and yet she didn’t cry out. Her head, too. I have to wonder what is under the bandage. Did the nuns catch her and beat her when she tried to steal their linen?

The dead birds feel impossibly heavy. I untie them from my wrists and let them fall in the dirt. I sit down beside her.

“You can take these birds home. You can roast them,” I say

“I am giving them to you.”

J Her mouth twists. She tosses her head and looks away.

I’m not ashamed, but there are some times this happens: alone in the woods, checking the trap line I find a wounded animal that hasn’t died well, or, worse, it’s still living, so that I have to put it out of its misery. Sometimes it’s just a big bird I only winged. When I do what I have to do, my throat swells closed sometimes. I touch the suffering bodies like they were killed saints I should handle with gentle reverence.

This is how I take Marie’s hand. This is how I hold her wounded hand in my hand.

She never looks at me. I don’t think she dares let me see her face.

We sit alone. The sun falls down the side of the world and the hill goes dark. Her hand grows thick and fevered, heavy in my own, and I don’t want her, but I want her, and I cannot let go.

bob..-, THE BEADS r a S (1948)

I didn’t want June Morrissey when they first brought her to my house.

But I ended up keeping her the way I would later end up keeping her son, Lipsha, when they brought him up the steps. I didn’t want her because I had so many mouths I couldn’t feed. I didn’t want her because I had to pile the children in a cot at night. One of the babies slept in a drawer to the dresser. I didn’t want June.

Sometimes we had nothing to eat but grease on bread. But then the two drunk ones told me how the girl had survived-by eating pine sap in the woods. Her mother was my sister, Lucille. She died alone with the girl out in the bush.

“We don’t know how the girl done it,” said the old drunk woman who I didn’t claim as my mother anymore.

“Lucille was coughing blood,” offered the Morrissey, the whining no-good who had not church-married my sister.

— OEM

“You dog,” I said. “Where were you when she died?”

“He was working in the potato fields,” the old drunk one wheedled.

Her eyes had squeezed back into her face. Her nose had spread and her cheeks were shot with black veins.

“He was rolling in his own filth more like it,” I said.

They were standing on my steps because I would not ask them onto my washed floor,

“I can’t take in another wild cat,” I said. Maybe it scared me, the feeling I might have for this one. I knew how it was to lose a child that got too special. I’d lost a boy. I had also lost a girl who would have almost been the age this poor stray was.

Those Lazarres just stood there, yawning and picking their gray teeth, with the girl between them most likely drunk too. Not older than nine years. She could hardly stand upright. I looked at her.