Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

But of course I couldn’t tell the dark truth.

It was evening, late. Grandma’s light was on underneath a crack in the door. About a week had passed since we buried Grandpa. I knocked first but there wasn’t no answer, so I went right in. The door was unlocked.

She was there but she didn’t notice me at first. Her hands were tied up in her rosary, and her gaze was fully absorbed in the easy chair opposite her, the one that had always been Grandpa’s favorite. I stood there, staring with her, at the little green nubs in the cloth and plastic armrest covers and the sad little hair-tonic stain he had made on the white dolly where he laid his head.

For the life of me I couldn’t figure what she was staring at. Thin space. Then she turned.

“He ain’t gone yet,” she said.

Remember that chill I luckily didn’t get from waiting in the slough?

I got it now. I felt it start from the very center of me, where fear hides, waiting to attack. It spiraled outward so that in minutes my fingers and teeth were shaking and clattering. I knew she told the truth. She seen Grandpa. Whether or not he had been there is not the point. She had seen him, and that meant anybody else could see him, too. Not only that but, as is usually the case with these here ghosts, he had a certain uneasy reason to come back. And of course Grandma Kashpaw had scanned it out.

I sat down. We sat together on the co-Lich watching his chair out of the corncr of our eyes. She had found him sitting in his chair when she walked in the door.

“It’s the love medicine, my Lipsha,” she said. “It was stronger than we thought. He came back even after death to claim me to his side.”

I was afraid. “We shouldn’t have tampered with it,” I said. She agreed. For a while we sat still. I don’t know what she thought, but my head felt screwed on backward. I couldn’t accurately consider the situation, so I told Grandma to go to bed. I would sleep on the couch keeping my eye on Grandpa’s chair. Maybe he would come back and maybe he wouldn’t. I guess I feared the one as much as the other, but I got to thinking, see, as I lay there in darkness, that perhaps even through my terrible mistakes some good might come. If Grandpa did come back, I thought he’d return in his right mind. I could talk with him. I could tell him it was all my fault for playing with power I did not understand.

Maybe he’d forgive me and rest in peace. I hoped this. I calmed myself and waited for him all night.

He fooled me though. He knew what I was waiting for, and it wasn’t what he was looking to hear. Come dawn I heard a blood splitting cry from the bedroom and I rushed in there. Grandma turnt the lights on.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed and her face looked harsh, pinched-up, gray.

“He was here,” she said. “He came and laid down next to me in bed.

And he touched me.”

Her heart broke down. She cried. His touch was so cold. She laid back in bed after a while, as it was morning, and I went to the couch.

As I lay there, falling asleep, I suddenly felt Grandpa’s presence and the barrier between us like a swollen river. I felt how I had wronged him, How awful was the place where I had sent him. Behind the wall of death, he’d watched the living eat and cry and get drunk. He was lonesome, but I understood he meant no harm.

“Go back,” I said to the dark, afraid and yet full of pity. “You got to be with your own kind now,” I said. I felt him retreating, like a sigh, growing less. I felt his spirit as it shrunk back through the walls, the blinds, the brick courtyard of Senior Citizens.

“Look up Aunt June,” I whispered as he left.

I slept late the next morning, a good hard sleep allowing the sun to rise and warm the earth. It was past noon when I awoke. There is nothing, to my mind, like a long sleep to make those hard decisions that you neglect under stress of wakefulness. Soon as I woke up that morning, I saw exactly what I’d say to Grandma. I had gotten humble in the past week, not just losing the touch but getting jolted into the understanding that would prey on me from here on out. Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart’s position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after-lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won’t ever come by such a bargain again. Also you have the feeling someone wore it before you and someone will after. I can’t explain that, not yet, but I’m putting my mind to it.

“Grandma,” I said,

“I got to be honest about the love medicine.”

She listened. I knew from then on she would be listening to me the way I had listened to her before. I told her al out the turkey hearts and how I had them blessed. I told her what I used as love medicine was purely a fake, and then I said to her what my understanding brought me.

“Love medicine ain’t what brings him back to you, Grandma.

No, it’s something else. He loved you over time and distance, but be went off so quick he never got the chance to tell you how he loves you, how he doesn’t blame you, how he understands. It’s true feeling, not no magic. No supermarket heart could have brung him back.”

She looked at me. She was seeing the years and days I had no way of knowing, and she didn’t believe me. I could tell this. Yet a look came on her face. It was like the look of mothers drinking sweetness from their children’s eyes. It was tenderness.

“Lipsha, ” she said, “you was always my favorite.”

She took the beads off the bedpost, where she kept them to say at night, and she told me to put out my hand. When I did this, she shut the beads inside of my fist and held them there a long minute, tight, so my hand hurt. I almost cried when she did this.

I don’t really know why. Tears shot up behind my eyelids, and yet it was nothing. I didn’t understand, except her hand was so strong, squeezing mine, The earth was full of life and there were dandelions growing out the window, thick as thieves, already seeded, fat as big yellow plungers. She let my hand go. I got up. “I’ll go out and dig a few dandelions,” I told her.

Outside, the sun was hot and heavy as a hand on my back. I felt it flow down my arms, out my fingers, arrowing through the ends of the fork into the earth. With every root I prized up there was return, as if I was kin to its secret lesson. The touch got stronger as I worked through the grassy afternoon. Uncurling from me like a seed out of the blackness where I was lost, the touch spread. The spiked leaves full of bitter mother’s milk. A buried root. A nuisance people dig up and throw in the sun to wither. A globe of frail seeds that’s indestructible.

THE GOOD TEARS r a a ri (1983) LULU LAMAR TINE 1.

No one ever understood my wild and secret ways. They used to say Lulu Lamartine was like a cat, loving no one, only purring to get what she wanted. But that’s not true. I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms. Sometimes I’d look out on my yard and the green leaves would be glowing. I’d see the oil slick on the wing of a grackle. I’d bear the wind rushing, rolling, like the far-off sound of waterfalls. Then I’d open my mouth wide, my ears wide, my heart, and I’d let everything inside.

After some time I’d swing my door shut and walk back into the house with my eyes closed. I’d sit there like that in my house. I’d sit there with my eyes closed on beauty until it was time to make the pickle brine or smash the boiled berries or the boys came home. But for a while after letting the world in I would be full.

I wouldn’t want anything more but what I had.

And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear.