Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

It went on for five years like that, until well after my youngest boy was born. Half Kashpaw. No wonder Lyman had money sense. Perhaps it would have gone like that for countless years more. I didn’t want more than I could get, I was pretty well content. But then the politician showed his true stripe, a Mywhite, and the love knot we had welded between us unbent.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement.

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don’t try, just let it in. I don’t believe in numbering God’s creatures. I never let the United States census in my door, even though they say it’s good for Indians. Well, quote me. I say that every time they counted us they knew the precise number to get rid of.

I believed this way even before those yellow-bearded Chinooks in their tie boots came to measure the land around Henry’s house. Henry Lamartine had never filed on or bought the land outright, but he lived there. He never took much stock in measurement, either. He knew like I did. If we’re going to measure land, let’s measure right. Every foot and inch you’re standing on, even if it’s on the top of the highest skyscraper, belongs to the Indians. That’s the real truth of the matter.

Of course, since when were higher-ups interested in the truth?

boom,-, One morning bright and early we got a regulation on our doorstep. It was signed with Kashpaw’s hand as representing the tribal government. In turn, that was the red-apple court representing Uncle Sam.

Kashpaw knocked that night.

“Lulu, ” he said, “it don’t mean nothing. just let me in.”

I stopped my ears and sicced the dogs on him. I was done with his lying hands.

I was the blood that pounded in his temples. I was the knock of his heart. I was the needle of desire. I worked my way through his body and sewed him up. Yet he was willing to turn me from my house.

Oh, they said they’d move it. Sure they did. How many times did we move? The Chippewas had started off way on the other side of the five great lakes. How we were shoved out on this lonesome knob of prairie my grandmother used to tell. It is too long a story to get into now.

Let’s just say that I refused to move one foot farther west. I was very much intent to stay where I was.

Around that time Henry’s brother, Beverly, appeared out of nowhere.

He wanted to get married. “I been waiting for you all these years,” he said. I believed no such thing, but he seemed so lost and dazed it was as if he had been sleepwalking through his life up until the time he fell back into my arms. I had a fond spot in my heart for Beverly. He was a smooth, mild man, and I thought he wouldn’t give me any trouble once I had him. I told Kashpaw about the marriage the next time I saw him in town, as though it were nothing to him.

“I’m tying the knot again. You know Bev Lamartine, from the Cities?”

Well Nector’s long face went longer. His eyes went blacker.

And what I saw in their hate pits made me cross my breast before I turned away. A love so strong brews the same strength of hate.

“I’ll kill him,” the eyes said. “Or else I’ll kill you.”

I thought his passion would die down. We never do one-half the things we threaten. But that was my mistaken judgment, for I hadn’t reckoned on the tribal mob.

Indian against Indian, that’s how the government’s money offer made us act. Here was the government Indians ordering their own people off the land of their forefathers to build a modern factory To make it worse, it was a factory that made equipment of false value. Keepsake things like bangle beads and plastic war clubs. A load of foolishness, that was.

Dreamstuff. I used that word in the speech when I stood up to the tribal council. I came before them. Kashpaw recognized me.

“Mrs. Lamartine has the floor,” he said.

“She’s had the floor and half the council on it,” I heard a whispered voice say. But I paid no heed and kept my head up proud.

I spoke. I looked deep through Nector Kashpaw and let my voice rove through the postcard Indian handsomeness of his personal dream stuff

Sweat had darkened patches on his workshirt beneath the arms. Perhaps he feared that I would tell how each night I made him wash his hands before he touched me, or what the insects saw us do with their blood-red eyes.

It was the stuff of dreams, I said. The cheap false longing that makes your money-grubbing tongues hang out. The United States government throws crumbs on the floor, and you go down so far to lick up those dollars that you turn your own people off the land. I got mad. “What’s that but merde?” I yelled at them.

“False value!” I said to them that this tomahawk factory mocked us all.

“She dyes her hair,” I heard a voice behind me whisper. “Gray at the roots.”

“The Lamartines lived all their life on that land,” I said. “The Lamartine family deserves to stay.”

A voice clapped itself over the mouth. But not before I heard it “Bitch!” By then there were near a hundred people in the cry, I room.

“All those Lamartine sons by different fathers.” That voice was loud enough to be heard. And then it said: “Ain’t the youngest Nector’s?” So I had no choice in what I did. I turned around.

I looked straight out at the people sitting in their unfolded chairs.

There was many a man who found something to study on the floor.

“I’ll name all of them,” I offered in a very soft voice. “The fathers I’ll point them out for you right here.”

There was silence, in which a motion was made from the floor.

“Restitution for Lamartine,” they said. “Monetary settlement.”

Relief blew through the room, but I would have none of it.

“We don’t want money,” I said. “We’re staying on our land.”

Every one of them could see it in my face. They saw me clear.

Before I’d move the Lamartine household I’d hit the tribe with a fistful of paternity suits that would make their heads spin. Some of them had forgotten until then that I’d even had their son. Still others must have wondered. I could see the back neck hair on the wives all over that room prickle. So it was. Eventually the meeting broke up. But to where? For it was soon after that Henry’s house burnt down.

I wish that Bev had gotten back from Minneapolis and stopped Kashpaw.

Here was the strange thing. Bev and me were married by a judge in the presence of the boys. Then a week later he told me he already had a wife. I put my foot down, of course. I can be a hard woman when I’m pressed. I told him to go-back there and get a divorce. I sent Gerry, my grownup baby tough as nails, in the car with him to the Cities in order to make certain that he dumped her. Whoever she was, I needed Bev worse.

Neither Bev nor Gerry came back for a long time. Bev had liked the idea of Gerry going along with him, but got more than bnxz; dp+ +;-.

A ” in’detenrlon, aa to’W111,’, day I think that Bev turned him in. I wasn’t too worried over that, however, since no white man has made a j’all that could hold the son of Old Man Pillager.

That’s one father’s name I gave away now, free. But of course Pillager was not sitting in the council room that night. And if he’d known about the fire, he would have scorched Kashpaw’s hands with it.

How do I know? How can I say it was Kashpaw who lit my house?

I can say so because of what I saw in his eyes when I looked deeply through him, after I told him about my marriage on the street like he was just any passing acquaintance. My house was burning in his eyes, and I was trapped there, alone, on fire with my own fire. The red-eyed moths had come out of the trees where they hid themselves, looking exactly like dead leaves.