Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

I was just in time to see Gerry Nanapush, emboldened by his godlike leap and recovery, pop a whee lie and disappear between the neat shrubs that marked the entrance to the hospital, Two weeks later Dot and her girl, who was finally named Shawn, like most girls born that year, came back to work at the scales.

Things went on as they had before, except that Shawn kept us occupied during the long hours. She was large, of course, and had a sturdy pair of lungs she used often. When she cried, she screwed her face into fierce baby wrinkles and would not be placated with sugar tits or pacifiers. Dot unzipped her parka halfway, pulled her blouse up, and let her nurse for what seemed like hours.

We could scarcely believe her appetite. Dot was a diligent producer of milk, however. Her breasts, like overfilled inner tubes, strained at her nylon blouses. Sometimes when she thought no one was looking, Dot rose and carried them in the crooks of her arms, for her shoulders were growing bowed beneath their weight.

The trucks came in on the hour, or half hour. I heard the rush of air brakes, gears grinding only inches from my head. It occurred to me that although I measured many tons every day, I would never know how heavy a ton was unless it fell on me. I wasn’t lonely now that Dot had returned. The season would end soon, and we wondered what had happened to Gerry.

There were only a few weeks left of work when we heard that Gerry was caught again. He’d picked the wrong reservation to hide on-Pine Ridge.

As always, it was overrun with federal agents and armored vehicles.

Weapons were stashed everywhere and easy to acquire. Gerry got himself a weapon. Two men tried to arrest him. Gerry would not go along, and when he started to run and the shooting started, Gerry shot and killed a clean shaven man with dark hair and light eyes, a state trooper, a man whose picture was printed in all the papers.

They sent Gerry to prison in Marion, Illinois. He was placed in the control unit. He receives visitors in a room where no touching is allowed, where the voice is carried by phone, glances meet through sheets of Plexiglas, and no children will ever be engendered.

Dot and I continued to work the last weeks together. Once we weighed baby Shawn. We unlatched her little knit suit, heavy as armor, and bundled her in a light, crocheted blanket. Dot went into the shack to adjust the weights. I stood there with Shawn.

She was such a solid child, she seemed heavy as lead in my arms.

busy, I placed her on the ramp between the wheel sights and held her steady for a moment, then took my hands slowly away. She stared calmly into the rough distant sky. She did not flinch when the wind came from every direction, wrapping us tight enough to squeeze the very breath from a stone. She was so dense with life, such a powerful distillation of Dot and Gerry, it seemed she might weigh about as much as any load.

But that was only a thought, of course. For as it turned out, she was too light and did not register at all.

da CROWN OF THORNS r U a S (1981) A month after June died Gordie took the first drink, and then the need was on him like a hook in his jaw, tipping his wrist, sending him out with needles piercing his hairline, his aching hands.

From the beginning it was his hands that made him drink. They remembered things his mind could not-curve of hip and taut breast.

They remembered farther back, to the times he spent, with June when the two were young. They had always been together, like brother and sister, stealing duck eggs, blowing crabgrass between their thumbs, chasing cows. They got in trouble together.

They fought but always made up easy and quick, until they were married.

His hands remembered things he forced his mind away from how they flew out from his sides in rage so sudden that he could not control the force and the speed of their striking. He’d been a mom”,” boxer in the Golden Gloves. But what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June.

They remembered this while they curled around the gold colored can of beer he had begged down the road at Eli’s.

“You gone too far now,” Ell said. Gordie knew he was sitting at his Uncle Ell’s table again because the orange spots in the oilcloth were there beneath his eyes. Ell’s voice came from the soft pure blackness that stretched out in all directions from the lighted area around the beer can. Gordie’s hands felt unclean. The can felt cold and pure.

It was as though his hands were soiling something never touched before.

The way the light fell it was as though the can were lit on a special altar.

“I’m contaminated,” Gordie said.

“You sure are. ” Eli spoke somewhere beyond sight. “You’re going to land up in the hospital.”

That wasn’t what he’d meant, Gordle struggled to say, but he was distracted suddenly by the size of his hands. So big. Strong.

“Look at that,” said Cordle wonderingly, opening and closing his fist.

“If only they’d let me fight the big one, huh? If only they’d gave me a chance.”

“You did fight the big one,” said Eli. “You got beat.”

“That’s right,” said Gordic. “it wasn’t even no contest. I wasn’t even any good.”

“You forget those things,” said Eli. He was moving back and forth behind the chair.

“Eat this egg. I fixed it over easy.”

“I couldn’t,” said Gordie, “or this bun either. I’m too sick.”

His hands would not stay still. He had noticed this. They managed to do an alarming variety of things while he was not looking.

Now they had somehow crushed the beer can into a shape. He took his hands away and studied the can in its glowing spotlight.

The can was bent at the waist and twisted at the hips like the torso of a woman. It rocked slightly side to side in the breeze from the window.

“She’s empty!” he realized suddenly, repossessing the can. “I don’t think it was full to begin with. I couldn’t’ve. ” “What?”

asked Eli. Patiently, his face calm, he spooned the egg and fork-toasted bread into his mouth. His head was brown and showed through the thin gray stubble of his crew cut. A pale light lifted and fell in the room. It was six A.M. “Want some?” Eli offered steaming coffee in a green plastic mug, warped and stained. It was the same color as his work clothes.

Gordie shook his head and turned away Eli drank from the cup himself “You wouldn’t have another someplace that you forgot?” said Gordie sadly.

“No,” said Eli.

“I’ve got to make a raise then,” said Gordie.

The two men sat quietly, then Gordie shook the can, put it down, and walked out of the door. Once outside, he was hit by such a burst of determination that He almost walked normally, balanced in one wheel rut, down Eli’s little road. Some of his thick hair stuck straight up in a peak, and some was crushed flat.

His face sagged. He’d hardly eaten that week, and his pants flapped beneath his jacket, cinched tight, the zipper shamefully unzipped.

Eli watched from his chair, sipping the coffee to warm his blood. He liked the window halfway open although the mornings were still cold.

When June lived with him she’d slept on the cot beside the stove, a lump beneath the quilts and army blankets when he came in to get her up for the government school bus.

Sometimes they’d sat together looking out the same window into cold blue dark. He’d hated to send her off at that lonely hour. Her coat was red. All her clothes were from the nuns. Once he’d bought June a plastic dish of bright bath-oil beads. Before he could stop her she had put one in her mouth, not understanding what it was. She’d swallowed it down, too. Then, when she’d come home, started crying out of disappointment and shame, bubbles had popped from her lips and nose.