Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicines is not for the layman to handle. You don’t just go out and get one without paying for it. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You got to think it over. Choose the right one. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.

So anyhow, I said to Grandma I’d give this love medicine some thought. I knew the best thing was to go ask a specialist like Old Man Pillager, who lives up in a tangle of bush and never shows himself.

But the truth is I was afraid of him, like everyone else. He was known for putting the twisted mouth on people, seizing up their hearts. Old Man Pillager was serious business, and I have always thought it best to steer clear of that whenever I could. That’s why I took the powers in my own hands. That’s why I did what I could.

I put my whole mentality to it, nothing held back. After a while I started to remember things I’d heard gossiped over.

I heard of this person once who carried a charm of seeds that boom.-, looked like baby pearls. They was attracted to a metal knife, which made them powerful. But I didn’t know where them seeds grew.

Another love charm I heard about I couldn’t go along with, because how was I suppose to catch frogs in the act, which it required.

Them little creatures is slippery and fast. And then the power fullest of all, the most extreme, involved nail clips and such. I wasn’t anywhere near asking Grandma to provide me all the little body bits that this last love recipe called for. I went walking around for days ‘just trying to think up something that would work.

Well I got it. If it hadn’t been the early fall of the year, I never would have got it. But I was sitting underneath a tree one day down near the school just watching people’s feet go by when something tells me, look up! Look up! So I look up, and I see two honkers, Canada geese, the kind with little masks on their faces, a bird what mates for life. I see them flying right over my head naturally preparing to land in some slough on the reservation, which they certainly won’t get off of alive.

It hits me, anyway. Them geese, they mate for life. And I think to myself, ‘just what if I went out and got a pair? And just what if I fed some part-say the goose heart-of the female to Grandma and Grandpa ate the other heart? Wouldn’t that work?

Maybe it’s all invisible, and then maybe again it’s magic. Love is a stony road. We know that for sure. If it’s true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say, then we’d be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn’t harm nobody anyway.

I thought it was worth my effort, and Grandma Kashpaw thought so, too.

She had always known a good idea when she heard one. She borrowed me Grandpa’s gun.

So I went out to this particular slough, maybe the exact same slough I never got thrown in by my mother, thanks to Grandma Kashpaw, and I hunched down in a good comfortable pile of rushes. I got my gun loaded up. I ate a few of these soft baloney sandwiches Grandma made me for lunch. And then I waited.

The cattails blown back and forth above my head. Them stringy blue herons was spearing up their prey. The thing I know how to do best in this world, the thing I been training for all my life, is to wait.

Sitting there and sitting there was no hardship on me. I got to thinking about some funny things that happened. There was this one time that Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it, flown up inside her dress and got lost within there. I recalled her running out into the hallway trying to yell something, shaking. She was doing a right good jig there, cutting the rug for sure, and the thing is it never flown out. To this day people speculate where it went. They fear she might perhaps of crushed it in her corsets. It sure hasn’t ever yet been seen alive. I thought of funny things for a while, but then I used them up, and strange things that happened started weaseling their way into my mind, I got to thinking quite naturally of the Larriartine’s cousin named Wristwatch.

I never knew what his real name was. They called him Wristwatch because he got his father’s broken wristwatch as a young boy when his father passed on. Never in his whole life did Wristwatch take his father’s watch off. He didn’t if it worked, although after a while he got sensitive when care people asked what time it was, teasing him. He often put it to his ear like he was listening to the tick. But it was broken for good and forever, people said so, at least that’s what they thought.

Well I saw Wristwatch smoking in his pickup one afternoon and by nine that evening he was dead.

He died sitting at the Larriartine’s table, too. As she told it, Wristwatch had just eaten himself a good-size dinner and she said would he take seconds on the hot dish when he fell over to the floor. They turnt him over. He was gone. But here’s the strange thing: when the Senior Citizen’s orderly took the pulse he noticed that the wristwatch Wristwatch wore was now working. The moment he died the wristwatch started keeping perfect time.

They buried him with the watch still ticking on his arm.

I got to thinking. What if some grave diggers dug up Wristwatch’s casket in two hundred years and that watch was still going? I thought what question they would ask and it was this: Whose hand wound it?

I started shaking like a piece of grass at just the thought.

Not to get off the subject or nothing. I was still hunkered in the slough. It was passing late into the afternoon and still no honkers had touched down. Now I don’t need to tell you that the waiting did not get to me, it was the chill. The rushes was very soft, but damp.

I was getting cold and debating to leave, when they landed. Two geese swimming here and there as big as life, looking deep into each other’s little pinhole eyes. just the ones I was looking for. So I lifted Grandpa’s gun to my shoulder and I aimed perfectly, and blam! Manz! I delivered two accurate shots. But the thing is, them shots missed. I couldn’t hardly believe it. Whether it was that the stock had warped or the barrel got bent some ways I don’t quite know, but anyway them geese flown off into the dim sky, and Lipsha Morrissey was left there in the rushes with evening fallen and his two cold hands empty. He had before him just the prospect of another day of bone-cracking chill in them rushes, and the thought of it got him depressed.

Now it isn’t my style, in no way, to get depressed.

So I said to myself, Lipsha Morrissey, you’re a happy SOB.

who could be covered up with weeds by now down at the bottom of this slough, but instead you’re alive to tell the tale. You might have problems in life, but you still got the touch. You got the power, Lipsha Morrissey. Can’t argue that. So put your mind to it and figure out how not to be depressed.

I took my advice. I put my mind to it. But I never saw at the time how my thoughts led me astray toward a tragic outcome none could have known.

I ignored all the danger, all the limits,

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for I was tired of sitting in the slough and my feet were numb. My face was aching. I was chilled, so I played with fire. I told myself love medicine was simple. I told myself the old superstitions was just that-strange beliefs. I told myself to take the ten dollars Mary MacDonald had paid me for putting the touch on her arthritis joint, and the other five I hadn’t spent yet from winning bingo last Thursday. I told myself to go down to the Ked Owl store.

And here is what I did that made the medicine backfire. I took

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shortcut. I looked at birds that was dead and froze.

an evi All right. So now I guess you will say,