Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

I put the fixed pot on the table, took my hat off the hook, went out and drove my pickup into town. My brain was sending me the kind of low ache that used to signal a lengthy drunk, and yet that was not what I felt like doing.

house, Anyway, once I got to town and stopped by the tribal offices, a drunk was out of the question. An emergency was happening.

And here is where events loop around and tangle again.

It is July. The sun is a fierce white ball. Two big semis from the Polar Bear Refrigerated Trucking Company are pulled up in the yard of the agency offices, and what do you think they’re loaded with? Butter.

That’s right. Seventeen tons of surplus butter on the hottest day in ‘52. That is what it takes to get me together with Lulu.

Coincidence. I am standing there wrangling with the drivers, who want to dump the butter, when Lulu drives by. I see her, riding slow and smooth on the luxury springs of her Nash Ambassador Custom.

“Hey Wu,” I shout, waving her into the bare, hot yard.

“Could you spare a couple hours?”

She rolls down her window and says perhaps. She is high and distant ever since the days of our youth. I’m not thinking, I swear, of anything but delivering the butter. And yet when she alights I cannot help notice an interesting feature of her dress. She turns sideways.

I see how it is buttoned all the way down the back. The buttons are small, square, plump, like the mints they serve next to the cashbox in a fancy restaurant.

I have been to the nation’s capital. I have learned there that spitting tobacco is frowned on. To cure myself of chewing I’ve took to rolling my own. So I have the makings in my pocket, and I quick roll one up to distract myself from wondering if those buttons hurt her where she sits.

“Your car’s air-cooled?” I ask. She says it is. Then I make a request, polite and natural, for her to help me deliver these fifty,ypound boxes of surplus butter, which will surely melt and run if they are left off in the heat.

She sighs. She looks annoyed. The hair is frizzled behind her L mom neck. To her, Nector Kashpaw is a nuisance. She sees nothing of their youth. He’s gone dull. Stiff. Hard to believe, she thinks, how he once cut the rug! Even his eyebrows have a little gray in them now.

Hard to believe the girls once followed him around!

But he is, after all, in need of her air conditioning, so what the heck?

I read this in the shrug she gives me.

“Load them in,” she says.

So the car is loaded up, I slip in the passenger’s side, and we begin delivering the butter. There is no set way we do it, since this is an unexpected shipment. She pulls into a yard and I drag out a box, or two, if they’ve got a place for it. Between deliveries we do not speak.

Each time we drive into the agency yard to reload, less butter is in the seems. People have heard about it and come to pick up the boxes themselves. It seems surprising, but all of that tonnage is going fast, too fast, because there still hasn’t been a word exchanged between Lulu and myself in the car. The afternoon is heated up to its worst, where it will stay several hours. The car is soft inside, deep cushioned and cool. I hate getting out when we drive into the yards.

Lulu smiles and talks to the people who come out of their houses. As soon as we are alone, though, she clams up and hums some tune she heard on the radio. I try to get through h several times.

“I’m sorry about Henry,” I say. Her husband was killed on the droad tracks. I never had a chance to say I was sorry.

“He was a good man.” That is all the answer I get.

“How are your boys?” I ask later. I know she has a lot of them, but you would never guess it. She seems so young.

“Fine. ” In desperation, I say she has a border of petunias that is the envy of many far-flung neighbors. Marie has often mentioned it.

“My petunias,” she tells me in a flat voice, “are none of your business.”

I am shut up for a time, then. I understand that this is useless.

Whatever I am doing it is not what she wants. And the truth is, I do not know what I want from it either. Perhaps ‘just a mention that I, Nector Kashpaw, middle-aged butter mover, was the young hard-muscled man who thrilled and sparked her so long ago.

As it turns out, however, I receive so much more. Not because of anything I do or say. It’s more mysterious than that.

We are driving back to the agency after the last load, with just two boxes left in the backseat, my box and hers. Since the petunias, she has not even hummed to herself So I am more than surprised, when, in a sudden burst, she says how nice it would be to drive up to the lookout and take in the view.

Now I’m the shy one.

“I’ve got to get home,” I say, “with this butter.”

But she simply takes the turn up the hill. Her skin is glowing, as if she were brightly golden beneath the brown. Her hair is dry and electric. I heard her tell somebody, where we stopped, that she didn’t have time to curl it. The permanent fuzz shorts out here and there above her forehead. On some women this might look strange, but on Lulu it seems stylish, like her tiny crystal earrings and the French rouge on her cheeks.

I do not compare her with Marie. I would not do that. But the way I ache for Lulu, suddenly, is terrible and sad.

“I don’t think we should,” I say to her when we stop. The shadows are stretching, smooth and blue, out of the trees.

“Should what?”

Turning to me, her mouth a tight gleaming triangle, her cheekbones high and pointed, her chin a little cup, her eyes lit, she watches.

“Sit here,” I say, “alone like this.”

“For heaven sake she says,

“I’m not going to bite. I just wanted to look at the view.”

wood Then she does just that. She settles back. She puts her arm out the window. The air is mild. She looks down on the spread of trees and sloughs. Then she shuts her eyes.

“It’s a damn pretty place,” she says. Her voice is blurred and contented. She does not seem angry with me anymore, and because of this, I can ask her what I didn’t know I wanted to ask all along. It surprises me by falling off my lips.

“Will you forgive me?”

She doesn’t answer right away, which is fine, because I have to get used to the fact that I said it.

“Maybe,” she says at last, “but I’m not the same girl.”

I’m about to say she hasn’t changed, and then I realize how much she has changed. She has gotten smarter than I am by a long shot, to understand she is different.

“I’m different now, too,” I am able to admit.

She looks at me, and then something wonderful happens to her face.

It opens, as if a flower bloomed all at once or the moon rode out from behind a cloud. She is smiling.

“So your butter’s going to melt,” she says, then she is laughing outright. She reaches into the backseat and grabs a block. It is wrapped in waxed paper, squashed and soft, but still fresh. She smears some on my face. I’m so surprised that I just sit there for a moment, feeling stupid. Then I wive the butter off my cheek. I take the block from her-andA put it’on the dash. When we grab each other and kiss there is butter on our hands. It wears off as we touch, then undo, each other’s clothes. All those buttons! I make her turn around so I won’t rip any off, then I carefully unbsten them.

“You’re different,” she agrees now, “better.”

I do not want her to say anything else. I tell her to lay quiet. Be still. I get the backrest down with levers. I know how to do this because I thought of it, offhand, as we were driving. I did not plan what happened, though. How could I have planned? How could I have known that I would take the butter from the dash? I home, rub a handful along her collarbone, then circle her breasts, then let it slide down between them and over the rough little tips. I rub the butter in a circle on her stomach.