Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

I was peeling potatoes in the same chair we sat in the night before.

But she’d slept through that, of course, and would not remember.

“I want to live with Eli,” she said in a voice clear as the voice she used giving directions to be hung. “I’m going to Eli’s house.”

“Go ahead, then,” I said.

I kept peeling the potato. One long spiral and it’s finished. I never even looked when she walked out the door, and only later in the season, when everything was bare and the rain slashed down without the mercy to turn to clean snow, did I reach my hand deep in the lard can where I kept my spools, scraps, and papers of pins. I knew before I even touched them. Her beads in a black heap.

I don’t pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don’t get me down.

I don’t pray, but sometimes I do touch the beads.

It has become a secret. I never look at them, just let my fingers roam to them when no one is in the house. It’s a rare tirriewhen I do this.

I touch them, and every time I do I think of small stones.

At the bottom of the lake, rolled aimless by the waves, I think of them polished. To many people it would be a kindness. But I see no kindness in how the waves are grinding them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear.

LULUS BOYS r a ra Jr (1957) On the last day that Lulu Lainartine spent as Henry’s widow, her boys were outside drinking beers and shooting plastic jugs. Her deceased husband’s brother, Beverly, was sitting across from her at the kitchen table. Having a name some people thought of as feminine had turned Beverly Lamartine to building up his imiscles in his youth, and they still bulged, hard as ingots in some places, now lost in others. His plush belly strained open the bottom buttons of his black shirt, and Lulu saw his warm skin peeking through. She also saw how the tattoos he and Henry had acquired on their arms, and which Lulu had always admired, were now deep black and so fuzzy around the edges that she could hardly tell what they were.

Beverly saw her looking at the old tattoos and pushed his sleeves up over his biceps. “Get an eyeful.” He grinned. As of old, he stretched his arms across the table, and she gazed at the balm figures commemorating the two brothers’ drunken travels outside her life.

There was a doll, a skull with a knife stuck in it, an eagle, a swallow, and Beverly’s name, rank, and serial number. Looking at the arm made Lulu remember her husband’s tattoos. Henry’s arms had been imprinted with a banner bearing some other woman’s name, a rose with a bleeding thorn, two lizards, and like his brother’s, with his name, rank, and serial number.

Sometimes Lulu could not help it. She thought of everything so hard that her mind felt warped and sodden as a door that swells up in spring.

It would not close properly to keep the troublesome thoughts out.

Right now she thought of those two lizards on either one of Henry’s arms. She imagined them clenching together when he put his arms around her. Then she thought of them coupling the same way she and Henry did.

She thought of this while looking at Beverly’s]one swallow, a bird with outstretched wings deep as ink and bleeding into his flesh. She remembered Beverly’s trick: the wings were carefully tattooed on certain muscles, so that when he flexed his arm the bird almost seemed to hover in a dive or swoop.

Lulu hadn’t seen her husband’s brother since the funeral in 1950, with the casket closed because of how badly Henry had suffered in the car wreck. Drunk, he had started driving the old Northern Pacific tracks and either fallen asleep or passed out, his car straddling the rails. As he’d left the bar that night everyone who had been there remembered his words.

“She comes barreling through, you’ll never see me again.”

At first they had thought he was talking about Lulu. But even at the time they knew she didn’t lose her temper over drinking. It was the train Henry had been talking about. They realized that later when the news came and his casket was sealed.

Beverly Lamartine had shown up from the Twin Cities one — mom hour before his brother’s service was held. He had brought along the trophy flag-a black swastika on torn red cloth-that he had captured to revenge the oldest Lamartine, a quiet boy, hardly spoken of now, who was killed early on while still in boot camp.

When the men from the veteran’s post had lowered Henry’s casket into the grave on ropes, there was a U.S. flag draped across it already.

Beverly had shaken out the trophy flag. He’d let it go in the air, and the wind seemed to suck it down, the black arms of the insignia whirling like a spider.

Watching it, Lulu had gone faint. The sudden spokes of the black wheel flashed before her eyes and she’d toppled dizzily, then stumbled over the edge of the grave.

The men were still lowering Henry on ropes. Lulu plunged heavily down with the trophy flag, and the ropes burned out of the pallbearers’ hands. The box hit bottom. People screamed and there was a great deal of commotion, during which Beverly jumped down to revive Lulu. All together, the pallbearers tugged and hoisted her out. The black garments seemed to make her even denser than she was. Her round face and chubby hands were a pale dough color, cold and wet with shock. For hours afterward she trembled, uttered senseless vowels, ‘jumped at sounds and touches. Some people, assuming that she had jumped in the grave to be buried along with Henry, thought much better of her for a while.

But most of her life Lulu had been known as a flirt. And that was putting it mildly. Tongues less kind had more indicting things to say.

For instance, besides the fact of Lulu Lamartine’s first husband, why did each of the boys currently shooting milk jugs out front of Henry’s house look so different? There were eight of them. Some of them even had her maiden name. The three oldest were Nanapushes. The next oldest were Morrisseys who took the name Lamartine, and then there were more assorted younger Lamartines who didn’t look like one another, either.

Red _ — ago hair and blond abounded; there was some brown. The black hair on the seven-year-old at least matched his mother’s. This boy was named Henry junior, and he had been born approximately nine months after Henry Senior’s death.

Give or take a week, Beverly thought, looking from Henry Junior out the window back to the woman across the table. Beverly was quite certain that he, and not his brother, was the father of that boy. In fact, Beverly had come back to the reservation with a hidden purpose.

Beverly Lamartine wanted to claim Henry junior and take him home.

In the Twin Cities there were great relocation opportunities for Indians with a certain amount of natural stick-to-itiveness and pride.

That’s how Beverly saw it. He was darker than most, but his parents had always called themselves French or Black Irish and considered those who thought of themselves as Indians quite backward. They had put the need to get ahead in Beverly. He worked devilishly hard.

Door to door, he’d sold children’s after-school home workbooks for the past eighteen years. The wonder of it was that he had sold any workbook sets at all, for he was not an educated man and if the customers had, as they might naturally do, considered him an example of his product’s efficiency they might not have entrusted their own children to those pages of sums and reading exercises. But they did buy the workbook sets regularly, for Bev’s ploy was to use his humble appearance and faulty grammar to ease into conversation with his hardworking get-ahead customers. They looked forward to seeing the higher qualities, which they could not afford, inculcated in their own children. Beverly’s territory was a small-town world of earnest dreamers. Part of Bev’s pitch, and the one that usually sold the books, was to show the wife or husband a wallet-sized school photo of his son.