Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.

There were times.

I’m going to tell you about the men. There were times I let them in just for being part of the world. I believe that angels in the body make us foreign to ourselves when touching. In this way I’d slip my body to earth, like a heavy sack, and for a few moments I would blend in with all that forced my heart. There was this one man I kept trying to forget. The handsome, distinguished man who burnt my house down.

He did it after I got married the third and last time. The fire balded me completely. I doubt I’ll ever marry again.

There’s no time for it anyway. By getting married to Nector Kashpaw I could have perhaps forgot him, but he dawdled. This way, that. He was my first love. We were young. Some nights ‘d talk behind the mission dance hall, and by midnight we’d we I I I have set the date.

Then I wouldn’t see him as the day grew closer.

At length I knew he loved, or at least was taken up with, someone else.

After I had figured that out, I married a riffraff Morrissey for hurt and spite. Then I married again out of fondness. That made twice.

All through this time I made a great pretense to ignore Nector Kashpaw.

“Hello.” I’d see him in town. “How the world have you been?”

And I’d have dreamed about sitting in his lap naked while the green dark rolled down. Or I’d have dreamed about his hands undoing everything.

The one I married for fondness, Henry, died one winter on a dangerous train crossing. I always knew they should have put some automatic bars up out there. He stalled in the middle of a soybean field, or maybe the train did not blow its warning whistle. There’s really no way to ever tell. After the funeral, though, my secret wildness took me over.

The more I think about it, I just never got Nector where I wanted him.

At my mercy, I suppose, so that I could have my will. That’s how I got most of them, strange to say, for I was never any looker. It was just that I kept my youth. They couldn’t take that away. Even bald and half blinded as I am at present, I have my youth and my pleasure.

I still let in the beauty of the world.

It’s a sad world, though, when you can’t get love right even after trying it as many times as I have.

After Henry’s funeral I came home and soaked in the pity of my eight sons, big boys, not a one of them the child of Henry in the factual sense. They were his spawn by force of habit, though.

They kept me company through loneliness. And they would look aside and never notice what my wildness made me do.

It doesn’t seem like twenty-six years ago, but indeed it was that long since I had my house on a beautiful hill that the tribe owned.

Henry had raised it there. It was in that house, during the dead of night, that Kashpaw would visit me after Henry died. I kept a window open on the yard, and he always had himself a pocketful of meat scraps to feed our half-wild dogs. After he climbed in, when he touched me, I would smell that at first. A ripe animal-death smell. I kept a bowl of soap and water by the bed, for I was frightened to have that smell upon my body.

It brought such pictures to mind.

Nobody knows this. When I was seven I found the body of a dead man in the woods. I used to go out there and sweep my secret playhouse, clean my broken pots with leaves, tend to my garden of rocks and feathers. I would go out there and stay for hour upon hour. Nobody knew where to find me, or really looked very hard, anyway. They were used to my going off alone.

My square of swept dirt in the woods is where I found the man.

He laid across my front door as though to guard it from strangers, like a dog. He was so relaxed on his back, hat tipped on his face, that at first I did not think he was dead. I hid in a Juneberry bush and waited for him to wake, to stretch, get up and leave. He was an old ragged burn, dark and lean. His clothes were earthen, a dim cloth of dirt and holes. When he did not move for a long time I stepped out.

I was never a patient thing. Bold and nervous, I took his hat off his face to wake him up.

He had been staring into it. I mean the dark bowl of his little brown cap. And now he stared into an endless ceiling of sky and leaves. I knew how wrong it was. My body stacked before my mind made up the right words to describe him. Death was something I had never come upon until then, but let me tell you, I knew it when I saw it.

Death was him. Staring into the ragged confinement of leaves. I put the cap back on his face. Then I left him, stepping over him. I went and sat in my playhouse to think.

I kept my eyes on him. After I put his cap back on his face he seemed asleep again. I sat there for a whole afternoon. He never moved. He never woke. He never seemed to know the passage of time.

So after a while, I knew that he was mine.

I never told anybody else he was there. He was the best thing I’d ever discovered. I went back to visit him the next morning while the dew was still wet on his clothes. I took the cap off his face and I saw how his eyes had changed, clouded like marbles. I touched the middle of his eye with the tip of a blade of grass, and he never blinked. It still surprised me, but I was less and less afraid. It seemed to me that he had come to my secret place for some reason. As young girls are, I was no different. I was curious.

Well maybe I was more curious than most.

He was so desperate poor that his clothing was nearly ripped off his body. The day went by. I cleaned up my house and then I cooked.

Acorns, beetles, patty dirt. I made some kind of food that was even deader than him and put a spoonful between his lips.

He had a strange jagged mouth. It was slightly open, as though it froze in the middle of an unspellable word.

It was just that time of summer before school starts, before the leaves turn yellow and fall off overnight, before I would have to get on the government bus and go off to boarding school. Some children never did come home, I’d heard. It was ‘just that time of summer when your life smarts and itches. When even your clothing hurts.

That’s why I did it. That’s why I did the worst.

Holes, dirt, with nothing but an old red scarf for a pants belt.

That was all he had on anyway. At first the cold hard stone of him surprised me. I only grazed him by accident. I did not really want to touch. I untied the knotted scarf, and his pants fell open from the waist. It was so easy I ‘jumped backward. His pants were worn and rotted. I can’t remember what I saw, or even how long I stayed. But soon after that the leaves came off the trees in yellow drifts, and every time I got close to my secret house a wall of smell rose up. I veered away. Then I went down to school on the government bus.

It was on that bus that Lulu Lamartine cried all the tears she would ever cry in her life. I don’t know why, but after that they just dried up.

Everyone who knows me will say I am a happy person. I go through life like a breeze. I try to greet the world without a grudge. I can beat the devil himself at cards because I play for the sheer amusement.

I never worry half as much as other people.

Things pass by. I suppose that Kashpaw was the one exception in my life.

I clung to him like no other. I wanted to get the best of him.

And I did. But for a time it seemed he had me over the barrel of his love. He came sneaking in my house with bad smells on his hands, and I made him wash before he touched me. But when he smelled like my lilac bath soap it would be blackness, deep blackness, and feathered insects with ruby eyes that watched us calmly in the dark. Nobody else ever knew of us. Nobody, if they don’t read this, ever will. We were that cautious. He had a wife who lost a boy and girl in fever, then took on too many children for anyone to count.