Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

What I saw was starved bones, a shank of black strings, a piece of rag on her I wouldn’t have used to wipe a pig. There were beads around her neck. Black beads on a silver chain.

“What’s that, a rosary on her neck?”

They started laughing, seesawing against the rail, whooping when they tried to tell the joke out.

“It was them bug eyes,” said the old one, “them ignoret bush Crees who found her and couldn’t figure out how she was raised, except the spirits.”

“They slung them beads around her neck.”

“To protect themselves.”

“Get out of here”-I grabbed the girl-“before I sic the dogs on you.

“Too good,” the old drunk flapped, “too damn good to wipe your own crap.” ‘t you. Storing money in your jar. What about ap, am your mother!

Ignatius!” she shrieked. That was the name of my father.

The Morrissey had enough sense to be dragging her down the steps.

L— mom

“Prince!” I veiled. “Dukie! Rex!”

The dogs came bounding up. The two went stumbling off, holding each other’s sagging weighted arms, and that was all I had to see of those Lazarres for a long time.

So I took the girl. I kept her. It wasn’t long before I would want to hold her against me tighter than any of the others. She was like me, and she was not like me. Sometimes I thought she was more like Eli. The woods were in June, after all, just like in him, and maybe more. She had sucked on pine sap and grazed grass and nipped buds like a deer.

the on y Lazarre I had any use for was Lucille, so from the first I tried to find my sister’s looks in the girl. I took her down behind the shack, where we kept the washtub in the summer.” lugging a kettle of boiling water and a can of fuel. I put the kerosene in her hair, wiped the nits out with a rag and comb. I knew how much the fuel on her scalp must have burned. But she never moved, just kept her eyes screwed shut and plainly endured. That was the only likeness I saw to Lucille.

Otherwise, as I scrubbed the pitiful scraps of her and wiped ointment over the sores, I saw nothing, no feature that belonged to either one, Lazarre or Morrissey, and I was glad. It was as if she really was the child of what the old people called Manitous, invisible ones who live in the woods. I could tell, even as I washed, that the Devil had no business with June. There was no mark on her. When the sores healed she would be perfect. As I clipped her hair away from her face I even saw that she might be pretty looking. Really not like Lucille, I thought, or anyone else I was related to. It was no wonder, but this made me like the girl still better.

She was dark, but even so her looks started to gleam and shine once I had her eating like a human. I cut down a dress of Zelda’s, a pair of Gordle’s pants, a blouse I had owned myself. The one thing she kept on wearing was the beads. Trying to explain to her L how they were holy beads, not mere regular jewelry, did no good. She just backed away and clutched them in her fist. She wore them constant, even though the others teased her and jerked them lightly from behind when I was not looking. There was no Devil in her. If there was I would have seen. She hardly spoke two words to anyone and never fought back when Aurelia pinched her arm or Gordie sneaked a bun off her plate.

That is why, as things went on, I found myself talking for her.

“Gordie,” I’d say, “stop. She hates you to pull her hair.”

It was as though I took over and became the voice that wouldn’t come from her lips but could be seen, very plain, in the wide up slanted black eyes. At first, because I liked her so, I thought I knew what she was thinking, but as it turned out I did not know what went through her mind at all.

They used to like playing in the woods, and I liked them to play there, too. They could run and scream all day, as loud as they wanted.

I liked the house to myself, afternoons. The babies fell asleep, and Nector worked off in the fields for someone else.

Then I could think. I didn’t have to sit still to think; all I needed was the quiet. I worked hard but I let my thoughts run out like water from a dam. I was churning and thinking that day. With each stroke of my dasher I progressed in thinking what to make of Nector. I had plans, and there was no use him trying to get out of them. I’d known from the beginning I had married a man with brains. But the brains wouldn’t matter unless I kept him from the bottle. He would pour them down the drain, where his liquor went, unless I stopped the holes, wore him out, dragged him back each time he drank, and tied him to the bed with strong ropes.

I had decided I was going to make him into something big on this reservation. I didn’t know what, not yet; I only knew when he got there they would not whisper “dirty Lazarre” when I walked down from church.

They would wish they were the woman I was. Marie Kashpaw. I thought of my mother, strip of old blanket for her belt, and I dashed so hard the cream stuck to the wood.

I heard yells, Zelda’s high, strained voice, the note she used when something she could tell on had happened. She flopped in the door.

“What’s it now?” I asked, expecting Gordie had put a burr in her hair.

“It’s June,” she gasped. “Mama, they’re hanging June out in the woods!”

I jumped. It was like a string snapped me from my chair. I ran out like a mad thing, over the field, right on Zelda’s heels. When I got to the place, I saw Gordle was standing there with one end of the rope that was looped high around a branch. The other end was tied in a loose loop around June’s neck.

“You got to tighten it,” I heard June say clearly, “before you hoist me up.”

I rushed forward. I flung off the noose. I grabbed Gordie’s ear and I rapped his hind end. For good measure I grabbed Aurelia and licked her good, too. When I’d ‘finished I threw them down and stood staring at them, panting and furious.

“Do you know what you almost did?” I screamed.

“She wanted us to hang her,” Gordie said. “We were playing.

She stole the horse.”

“She told us to,” Aurelia said. “She said where to put the rope.

Their lies maddened me.

“I’ll show you where to put the rope,” I yelled. I was going to knot it and use it again on them, when I heard a dry little sound, a tearless weeping sound, from June, and I turned.

She was standing upright, tall and bone-thin and hopeless, with the rosary wrapped around her hand as it is wrapped around the hands of the dead.

“You ruined it.” Her eyes blinked at me, dry, as she choked it out.

“I stole their horse. So I was supposed to be hanged.”

I gaped at her.

OIL.

“Child,” I said, “you don’t know how to play. It’s a game, but if they hang you they would hang you for real.”

She put her head down. I could almost have sworn she knew what was real and what was not real, and that I’d still ruined it.

“You damn old bitch.” I heard, unbelievably, those words muttered under her breath.

“What?”

“You damn old bitch,” she said, aloud, again.

I grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her flying across the field.

She was light as a leaf. I tossed her in the house. Then I grabbed the jaw and packed a handful of soap flakes in her mouth. None of my children ever called me a bad name before.

She spat and bubbled.

“Damn old chicken!” she gasped again. Looking at her face, strained and wild, sick and greening on the soap, I had to wonder if she knew what she was saying. Was her mind shot? The other children were gaping at the door, satisfied with horror, thrilled with her punishment.

“Chores!” I said. They vanished)in a whirl of clothes and flying hair.