Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

I knew he was at the Senior Citizens, but I hadn’t yet seen him or his wife, Marie, on the morning I went walking those halls. As it turned out I just about ran into him. My vision was so bad I only saw dim shapes or holes of space, and when I walked past the candy machine I thought that he was attached to it. But the less I saw the more I had developed my other senses, so I felt what I knew were a man’s eyes upon me before I could tell where he was.

I turned toward the gaze and saw the shape I knew was Kashpaw, even though the outline of him was vague, cracked and shifting.

“Hello Nector,” I said.

And now I heard h;s breath. He said no word.

“It’s me. Lulu,” I told him. “Have I changed so much?”

He repeated my name flatly as he would have said doorknob.

Then he turned to the candy machine and gave it a hard shove. I heard, the little paper packages in the slots whisk back and rustle.

A strange complicated hesitation swept over me. Part of me wanted to walk away. People had told me that he was changed, but I guess I had not believed it. Now it was one way or the other.

He was here. As much as I wanted to leave I also wanted to stay and put my arms around him, simply, in the broad daylight of our old age.

He shoved the tin box again then struck it with the flat of his hand.

The way he gulped he could have been crying.

“Sometimes they just take your money,” I said.

“Peanut butter cups. ” He turned from the machine’s lit face. “I wanted a pack of them peanut butter cups,” he said. And I realized that bit of candy was all he had in his mind. I was less than a chair or an old shoe to NeCtOr.

Wasn’t that just like him? People said Nector Kashpaw had changed, but the truth was he’d just become more like himself than ever. I left him mourning at the window of the glowing machine, staring at the array in a child’s billow of frustration. It was too soon to tell what I felt for him. I suppose I felt sorry for what a greedy thing he’d been all along, and how it showed now.

But I didn’t go back and give him a quarter. I still cared enough about him not to do that.

Now as I said, his wife, Marie, also lived in the home. It might seem odd I never spoke of her yet, but really it’s not. I never wanted to admit the existence of wives, you see, and they were just as anxious not to realize about Lulu I.Amartine. If we could have snapped our fingers to get rid of each other we would have done that. But since we couldn’t, we did the next best and ignored. That’s not to say I didn’t notice her. She was big and slightly hunched with bad legs. On hot days I guess it hurt her very much to move.

Marie was always good at taking care of things, and once she got to Senior Citizens she started right in with organizing pinochle nights.

Sometimes I played cards with a magnifying glass and sometimes I ‘just played by feel and what I could hear. My ears had seemed to grow]like radar. That was how I heard my name come up in conversation under bids on the far side of the room.

“Standing by the candy machine with Lulu the other day.

I heard a voice tell another. Who? I had a feeling it was Marie.

And sure enough I heard another voice I recognized as hers an’He’s like a child now. He’s just got to have his candy come swer. I I what might.”

I understood it was the nature of his disease Marie was talking about, and not the times Kashpaw came in my window. But it might as well have been that. The way it hit me she was correct.

He always did have to have his candy come what might and whether Lulu or Marie was damaged by his taking it. All that mattered was his greed.

And the odd thing was, I loved him for it.

We were two of a kind. There is no getting around that. We took our pleasure without asking or thinking further than a touch. We were so deeply sunk in the land of our greed it took the court action of the tribe and a house on fire to pull us out.

Hearing her voice I tried imagining what Marie must have thought. He came each week in the middle of the night. She must have known he wasn’t out taking walks to see the beauty of the dark heaven. I wondered. Of course, there was no way I could ask her. It was probably too late, after the fact and all, to get to know her. I thought of joining one of the entertainment or health committees she was on, but my nerve failed. And, besides, I was suffering worse from the eyesight every day, almost as how.-, if the longer I sat quiet in the Senior Citizens, reflecting on the human heart, the more inward turned my vision, until I was almost blind to the outside world.

Was it the blindness itself, so black it matched his lifelong greed?

Was it the true remaining desire of my wants? Or was what happened just plain stupidity?

One day I was cutting back rhubarb in the courtyard when he came up behind me with a stick in his hand. I knew, as if by instinct, it was one of those dandelion diggers, forked like his tongue.

“Don’t bother me,” I said, walking back in the building. He followed. I had a load in the laundry room to check. He stepped into the room behind me, and then he shut the door. I turned to him, silent.

“Lulu, call the dogs off,” he said.

After all the grudge, the pity, I could not help but take him in

“Down boys,” I whispered. “Leave Nector be.”

my arms. I He held me tightly, and we began to kiss. But things being what they were, what with him knocking off my wig and Lipsha Morrissey popping in unexpectedly to ask what was going on, nothing really went too far after that first surprising embrace. As soon as I got free I walked out of there leaving my laundry sitting in the tumblers.

Dreamstuff. It was all I needed at this time.

Once I gave the tribal council hell about their mortal illusions.

And yet here I was making my one big mistake in life over again for the sake of illusion. What I felt for Nector was just elusive dreams but no less powerful for being false. He had no true memory or mind.

I should have known that.

I was down in Grand Forks, surviving my operation, when Nector Kashpaw died. I saw no ghostly green light, heard no voice.

Nothing unusual happened to inform me of his passing. Lyman told me about it the day after, when he came down to take me back to Senior Citizens. In a strange way I took the news calmly, but I was grateful the pads of cotton were taped over my eyes. I was glad not to show all I felt, and yet Lyman must have noticed something.

“He was your boyfriend once, wasn’t he?” Lyman asked after my long silence. His voice was hesitating, almost sad. I pictured Lyman about ten years old. He was chubbier then and kept his dimes in an old Nesbits pop bottle.

“Where did you hear about me and Kashpaw?”

“Around. ” “I was always a hot topic,” I said.

I could feel that he didn’t smile. He was never quite the same after Henry.

“You know what?” he sighed after a while. “I don’t really want to know.”

Of course, he did know that Kashpaw was his father. What he really meant was there was nothing to be done about it anymore.

I felt the loss. I wanted to hold my son in my lap and let him cry.

Even blind, a mother knows when her boy is holding in a painful silence.

But we got packed and never said another word all the way home. The new expensive car, the first one he’d bought since the convertible, was cool and tight inside as a cave. It hadn’t struck me, going down to the hospital, but on the way back I was sad at the thought that we would soon arrive at a place, break our silence, and leave the soft deep bucket seats.

“Let’s go driving around someday,” I said when he let me into my apartment.

But he didn’t answer. He just said he had to go.