Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

It sure makes you chew slow, that’s for damn sure. When Grandpa fell off his chair better believe me that little graphic illustrated poster fled into my mind. I jumped out the bedroom. I done everything within my power that I could do to un lodge what was choking him. I squeezed underneath his ribcage. I socked him in the back. I was desperate.

But here’s the factor of decision: he wasn’t choking on the heart alone.

There was more to it than that. It was other things that choked him as well. It didn’t seem like he wanted to struggle or fight. Death came and tapped his chest, so he went just like that. I’m sorry all through my body at what I done to him with that heart, and there’s those who will say Lipsha Morrissey is just excusing himself off the hook by giving song and dance about how Grandpa gave up.

Maybe I can’t admit what I did. My touch had gone worthless, that is true. But here is what I seen while he lay in my arms.

You hear a person’s life will flash before their eyes when they’re in danger. It was him in danger, not me, but it was his life come over me.

I saw him dying, and it was like someone pulled the shade down in a room. His eyes clouded over and squeezed shut, but just before that I looked in. He was still fishing in the middle of Lake Turcot. Big thoughts was on his line and he had half a case of beer in the boat.

He waved at me, grinned, and then the bobber went under.

Grandma had gone out of the room crying for help. I bunched my force up in my hands and I held him. I was so wound up I couldn’t even breathe.

All the moments he had spent with me, all the times he had hoisted me on his shoulders or pointed into the leaves was concentrated in that moment. Time was flashing back and forth like a pinball machine. Lights blinked and balls hopped and rubber bands chirped, until suddenly I realized the last ball had gone down the drain and there was nothing. I felt his force leaving him, flowing out of Grandpa never to return. I felt his mind weakening. The bobber going under in the lake. And I felt the touch retreat back into the darkness inside my body, from where it came.

One time, long ago, both of us were fishing together. We caught a big old snapper what started towing us around like it was a motor.

“This here fishline is pretty damn good,” Grandpa said.

“Let’s keep this turtle on and see where be takes us.” So we rode along behind that turtle, watching as from time to time it surfaced.

The thing was just about the size of a washtub. It took us all around the lake twice, and as it was traveling, Grandpa said something as a joke. “Lipsha,” he said, “we are glad your mother didn’t want you because we was always looking for a boy like you who would tow us around the lake.”

“I ain’t no snapper. Snappers is so stupid they stay alive when their head’s chopped off,” I said.

“That ain’t stupidity,” said Grandpa. “Their brain’s just in their heart, like yours is.”

When I looked up, I knew the fuse had blown between my heart and my mind and that a terrible understanding was to be given.

Grandma got back into the room and I saw her stumble. And then she went down too. It was like a house you can’t hardly believe has stood so long, through years of record weather, suddenly goes down in the worst yet. It makes sense, is what I’m saying, but you still can’t hardly believe it. You think a person you know has got through death and illness and being broke and living on commodity rice will get through anything. Then they fold and you see how fragile were the stones that underpinned them. You see how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid. You see the stop signs and the yellow dividing markers of roads you traveled and all the instructions you had played according to vanish. You see how all the everyday things you counted on was just a dream you had been having by which you run your whole life.

She had been over me, like a sheer overhang of rock dividing Lipsha Morrissey from outer space. And now she went underneath. It was as though the banks gave way on the shores of Lake Turcot, and where Grandpa’s passing was just the bobber swallowed tinder by his biggest thought, her fall was the house and the rock under it sliding after, sending half the lake splashing up to the clouds.

Where there was nothing.

You play them games never knowing what you see. When I fell into the dream alongside of both of them I saw that the dominions I had defended myself from anciently was but delusions of the screen. Blips of light.

And I was scot-free now, whistling through space.

I don’t know how I come back. I don’t know from where. They was slapping my face when I arrived back at Senior Citizens and they was oxygenating her. I saw her chest move, almost unwilling. She sighed the way she would when somebody bothered her in the middle of a row of beads she was counting. I think it irritated her to no end that they brought her back. I knew from the way she looked after they took the mask off, she was not going to forgive them disturbing her restful peace. Nor was she forgiving Lipsha Morrissey. She had been stepping out onto the road of death, she told the children later at the funeral.

I asked was there any stop signs or dividing markers on that road, but she clamped her lips in a vise the way she always done when she was mad.

Which didn’t bother me. I knew when things had cleared out she wouldn’t have no choice. I was not going to speculate where the blame was put for Grandpa’s death. We was in it together.

She had slugged him between the shoulders, My touch had failed him, never to return.

All the blood children and the took-ins, like me, came home from Minneapolis and Chicago, where they had relocated years ago. They stayed with friends on the reservation or with Aurelia or slept on Grandma’s floor. They were struck down with grief and bereavement to be sure, every one of them. At the funeral I sat down in the back of the church with Albertine. She had gotten all skinny and ragged haired from cramming all her years of study into two or three. She had decided that to be a nurse was not enough for her so she was going to be a doctor.

But the way she was straining her mind didn’t look too hopeful. Her eyes were hefty, bloodshot from driving and crying. She took my hand.

From the back we watched all the children and the mourners as they hunched over their prayers, their hands stuffed full of Kleenex. It was someplace in that long sad service that my vision shifted. I began to see things different, more clear. The family kneeling down turned to rocks in a field. It struck me how strong and reliable grief was, and death. Until the end of time, death would be our rock.

So I had perspective on it all, for death gives you that. All the Kashpaw children had done various things to me in their lives shared their folks with me, loaned me cash, beat me up in secret-and I decided, because of death, then and there I’d call it quits. If I ever saw King again, I’d shake his hand. Forgiving somebody else made the whole thing easier to bear.

Everybody saw Grandpa off into the next world. And then the Kashpaws had to get back to their jobs, which was numerous and impressive. I had a few beers with them and I went back to Grandma, who had sort of got lost in the shuffle of everybody being sad about Grandpa and glad to see one another.

Zelda had sat beside her the whole time and was sitting with her now.

I wanted to talk to Grandma, say how sorry I was, that it wasn’t her fault, but only mine. I would have, but Zelda gave me one of her looks of strict warning as if to say,

“I’ll take care of Grandma. Don’t horn in on the women.”

If only Zelda knew, I thought, the sad realities would change her.