Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

“And you got no more whoopee to pitch anymore anyhow!”

“She yelled at last, surprising me so my jaw ‘just dropped, for us kids all had pretended for so long that those rustling sounds we heard from their side of the room at night never happened. She sure had pretended it, up till now, anyway. I saw that tears were in her eyes.

And that’s when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him. And it gave me a real shock to the system. You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead.

And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind.

So I didn’t know what to do. I was in a laundry then. They was like parents to me, the way they had took me home and reared PI me. I could see her point for wanting to get him back the way he was so at least she could argue with him, sleep with him, not be shamed out by Larriartine.

She’d always love him. That hit me like a ton of bricks.

For one whole day I felt this odd feeling that cramped my hands. When you have the touch, that’s where longing gets you. I never loved like that. It made me feel all inspired to see them fight, and I wanted to go out and find a woman who I would love until one of us died or went crazy. But I’m not like that really. From time to time I heal a person all up good inside, however when it comes to the long shot I doubt that I got staying power.

And you need that, staying power, going out to love somebody.

I knew this quality was not going to jump on me with no effort.

So I turned my thoughts back to Grandma and Grandpa. I felt her side of it with my hands and my tangled guts, and I felt his ‘de of it within the stretch of my mentality. He had gone out to si I I I lunch one day and never came back. He was fishing in the middle of Lake Turcot. And there was big thoughts on his line, and he kept throwing them back for even bigger ones that would explain to him, say, the meaning of how we got here and why we have to leave so soon. All in all, I could not see myself treating Grandpa with the touch, bringing him back, when the real part of him had chose to be off thinking somewhere. It was only the rest of him that stayed around causing trouble, after all, and we could handle most of it without any problem.

Besides, it was hard to argue with his reasons for doing some things.

Take Holy Mass. I used to go there just every so often, when I got frustrated mostly, because even though I know the Higher Power dwells everyplace, there’s something very calming about the cool greenish inside of our mission. Or so I thought, anyway. Grandpa was the one who stripped off my delusions in this matter, for it was he who busted right through what Father Upsala calls the sacred serenity of the place.

We filed in that time. Me and Grandpa. We sat down in our book.-, pews. Then the rosary got started up pre-Mass and that’s when Grandpa filled up his chest and opened his mouth and belted out them words.

HAIL MARIE FULL OF GRACE.

He had a powerful set of lungs.

And he kept on like that. He did not let up. He hollered and he yelled them prayers, and I guess people was used to him by now, because they only muttered theirs and did not quit and gawk like I did. I was getting red-faced, I admit. I give him the elbow once or twice, but that wasn’t nothing to him. He kept on. He shrieked to heaven and he pleaded like a movie actor and he pounded his chest like Tarzan in the Lord I Am Not Worthies. I thought he might hurt himself Then after a while I guess I got used to it, and that’s when I wondered: how come?

So afterwards I out and asked him. “How come? How come you yelled?”

“God don’t hear me otherwise,” said Grandpa Kashpaw.

I sweat. I broke right into a little cold sweat at my hairline because I knew this was perfectly right and for years not one damn other person had noticed it. God’s been going deaf Since the Old Testament, God’s been deafening up on us. I read, see.

Besides the dictionary, which I’m constantly in use of, I had this Bible once. I read it. I found — there was discrepancies between then and now. It struck me. Here God used to raineth bread from clouds, smite the Phillipines, sling fire down on red-light districts where people got stabbed. He even appeared in person every once in a while.

God used to pay attention, is what I’m saying.

Now there’s your God in the Old Testament and there is Chippewa Gods as well. Indian Gods, good and bad, like tricky Nanabozho or the water monster, Missepeshu, who lives over in Lake Turcot. That water monster was the last God I ever heard to appear. It had a weakness for young girls and grabbed one of the Blues off her rowboat. She got to shore all right, but only after Add MEL Attacked this monster had its way with her. She’s an old lady now. Old Lady Blue. She still won’t let her family fish that lake.

Our Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least they come around. They’ll do a favor if you ask them right. You don’t have to yell. But you do have to know, like I said, how to ask in the right way. That makes problems, because to ask proper was an art that was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground. Even now, I have to wonder if Higher Power turned it back, if we got to yell, or if we ‘just don’t speak its language.

I looked around me. How else could I explain what all I bad seen in my short life-King smashing his fist in things, Gordie drinking himself down to the Bismarck hospitals, or Aunt June left by a white man to wander off in the snow. How else to explain the times my touch don’t work, and farther back, to the old time Indians who was swept away in the outright germ warfare and dirty-dog killing of the whites. In those times, us Indians was so much kindlier than now.

We took them in.

Oh yes, I’m bitter as an old cutworm just thinking of how they done to us and doing still.

So Grandpa Kashpaw just opened my eyes a little there. Was there any sense relying on a God whose ears was stopped? just like the government? I says then, right off, maybe we got nothing but ourselves.

And that’s not much, just personally speaking. I know I don’t got the cold hard potatoes it takes to understand everything.

Still, there’s things I’d like to do. For instance, I’d like to help some people like my Grandpa and Grandma Kashpaw get back some happiness within the tail ends of their lives.

I told you once before I couldn’t see my way clear to putting the direct touch on Grandpa’s mind, and I kept my moral there, but something soon happened to make me think a little bit of mental adjustment wouldn’t do him and the rest of us no harm.

It was after we saw him one afternoon in the sunshine court yard of the Senior Citizens with Lulu Lamartine. Grandpa used to like to dig there.

He had his little dandelion fork out, and he was prying up them dandelions right and left while Lamartme watched him.

“He’s scratching up the dirt, all right,” said Grandma, watching Lamartine watch Grandpa out the window.

Now Lamartine was about half the considerable size of Grandma, but you would never think of sizes anyway. They were different in an even more noticeable way. It was the difference between a house fixed up with paint and picky fence, and a house left to weather away into the soft earth, is what I’m saying.

Urnartine was ‘acked up, latticed, shuttered, and vinyl sided, while Grandma sagged and bulged on her slipped foundations and let her hair go the silver gray of rain-dried lumber, Right now, she eyed the Lamartine’s pert flowery dress with such a look it despaired me. I knew what this could lead to with Grandma.