Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

Mary Martin had prepared herself so strictly for the sight of a woman’s body that the animal jolted her perhaps more than if the woman had been there. At the first sight of it, so strange and awful, a loud cackle came from her mouth. Her legs sagged, suddenly old, and a fainting surge of weakness spread through her. She managed to open the door.

There was no mistake-dun flanks, flag tail, curled legs, and lolling head, The yard light showed it clearly. But she had to believe. She bent into the car, put her hands straight out, and lowered them carefully onto the deer. The flesh was stiff, but the short hair seemed warm and alive. The smell hit her-the same frightening smell that had been on the man-some death musk that deer give off, acrid and burning and final. Suddenly and without warning, like her chest were cracking, the weeping broke her. It came out of heTwith hard violence, loud in her ears, a wild burst of sounds that emptied her.

When it was over, she found herself in the backseat wedged against the animal’s body.

Night was lifting. The sky was blue gray. She thought she could smell the dew in the dust and silence. Then, almost dreamily, she shook her head toward the light, blank for a moment as a waking child.

She heard the wailing voice, an echo of hers, and remembered the man at the edge of the gravel lot.

She crawled from the car, shook the cramps from her legs, and started toward him. Her hands made gestures in the air, but no sound came from her mouth. When he saw that she was coming at him he stopped in the middle of a bawl. He stiffened, windilled his arms, and stumbled backward in a cardboard fright.

Lights were on behind him in the convent. Mary Martin began to run.

He whirled to all sides, darting glances, then fled with incredible quickness back along the sides of the building to the long yard where there were orchards, planted pines, then the reservation grass and woods.

She followed him, calling now, into the apple trees but lost him there, and all that morning, while they waited for the orderlies and the tribal police to come with cuffing and litters and a court order, they heard him crying like a drowned person, howling in the open fields.

how_ LOVE MEDICINE r (1982)

I never really done much with my life, I suppose. I never had a television. Grandma Kashpaw had one inside her apartment at the Senior Citizens, so I used to go there and watch my favorite shows. For a while she used to call me the biggest waste on the reservation and hark back to how she saved me from my own mother, who wanted to tie me in a potato sack and throw me in a slough. Sure, I was grateful to Grandma Kashpaw for saving me like that, for raising me, but gratitude gets old.

After a while, stale. I had to stop thanking her. One day I told her I had paid her back in full by staying at her beck and call.

I’d do anything for Grandma. She knew that. Besides, I took care of Grandpa like nobody else could, on account of what a handful he’d gotten to be.

But that was nothing. I know the tricks of mind and body in side out without ever having trained for it, because I got the touch.

It’s a thing you got to be born with. I got secrets in my hands that nobody ever knew to ask. Take Grandma Kashpaw with her tired veins all knotted up in her legs like clumps of blue

“Is. I take my fingers and I snap them on the knots. The niedisnal cine flows out of me. The touch.

I run my fingers up the maps of those rivers of veins or I knock very gentle above their hearts or I make a circling motion on their stomachs, and it helps them.

They feel much better. Some women pay me five dollars.

I couldn’t do the touch for Grandpa, though. He was a hard nut. You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where. There is this woman here, “Lulu Lamartine, who always had a thing for Grandpa.

She loved him since she was a girl and always said he was a genius.

Now she says that his mind got so full it exploded.

How can I doubt that? I know the feeling when your mental power builds up too far. I always used to say that’s why the Indians got drunk. Even statistically we’re the smartest people on the earth.

Anyhow with Grandpa I couldn’t hardly believe it, because all my youth he stood out as a hero to me. When he started getting toward second childhood he went through different moods. He would stand in the woods and cry at the top of his shirt. It scared me, scared everyone, Grandma worst of all.

Yet He was so smart-do you believe W-that he knew he was getting foolish.

He said so. He told me that December I failed school and come back on the train to Hoopdance. I didn’t have nowhere else to go. He picked me up there and he said it straight out: “I’m getting into my second childhood.” And then he said something else I still remember: “I been chosen for it. I couldn’t say no.” So I figure that a man so smart all his life-tribal chairman and the star of movies and even pictured in the statehouse and on cans of snuff-would know what he’s doing by saying yes. I think he was called to second childhood like anybody else gets a call for the priesthood or the army or whatever. So I really did not listen too hard when the doctor said this was some kind of disease old people got eating too much sugar. You just can’t tell me that a man who went to Washington and gave them bureaucrats what for could lose his mind from eating too much Milky Way. No, he put second childhood on himself Behind those songs he sings out in the middle of Mass, and back of those stories that everybody knows by heart, Grandpa is thinking hard about life. I know the feeling. Sometimes I’ll throw up a smokescreen to think behind.

I’ll hitch up to Winnipeg and play the Space Invaders for six hours, but all the time there and back I will be thinking some fairly deep thoughts that surprise even me, and I’m used to it. As for him, if it was just the thoughts there wouldn’t be no problem.

Smokescreen is what irritates the social structure, see, and Grandpa has done things that ‘just distract people to the point they want to throw him in the cookie Jar where they keep the mentally insane. He’s far from that, I know for sure, but even Grandma had trouble keeping her patience once he started sneaking off to Lamartine’s place. He’s not supposed to have his candy, and Lulu feeds it to him. That’s one of the reasons why he goes.

Grandma tried to get me to put the touch on Grandpa soon after he began stepping out. I didn’t want to, but before Grandma started telling me again what a bad state my bare behind was in when she first took me home, I thought I should at least pretend.

I put my hands on either slide of Grandpa’s head. You wouldn’t look at him and say he was crazy. He’s a fine figure of a man, as Lamartine would say, with all his hair and half his teeth, a beak like a hawk, and cheeks like the blades of a hatchet. They put his picture on all the tourist guides to North Dakota and even copied his face for artistic paintings. I guess you could call him a monument all of himself. He s,started grinning when I put my hands on his templates, and I knew right then he knew how come I touched him. I knew the smokescreen was going to fall.

And I was right: just for a moment it fell.

“Let’s pitch whoopee,” he said across my shoulder to Grandma.

They don’t use that expression much around here anymore, but for damn sure it must have meant something. It got her goat right quick.

She threw my hands off his head herself and stood in front of him, overmatching him pound for pound, and taller too, for she had a growth spurt in middle age while he had shrunk, so now the length and breadth of her surpassed him. She glared up and spoke her piece into his face about how he was off at all hours spoke her piece into his racc avout torricatting and chasing Lamartine again and making a damn old fool of himself