Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

“What should we do? What should we do?”

they said. He thought the police might come to get his father again.

It had happened once before in the middle of a normal day. They had come to the door and snapped the circles on big King’s wrists. Now he heard his father and mother go into the next room, then they were’ quiet. He leaned back against the porcelain tank. He could sleep now; whatever she screamed about was over.

LIPS HA MORRISSEY King Kashpaw was advising me: 14 There’s no way you’re gonna lose the M. P Shit. Turn yourself in! I know them bastards don’t let up on you, man. I was in the Marines. ” “You been a lot of places,” Lynette told her husband roughly.

“Stillwater Pen?”

“Fuck that for now. I was in Nam.”

“He never got off the West Coast.” Lynette leaned back to me with a bleery confiding look. Not that she’d been drinking She seemed punch-addled or half asleep. “We listen to him anyway,” she winked.

“How he does blab on.”

King glared at the little green-and-yellow-checkered mat in the middle of the table, but he didn’t take up the challenge. In the past couple of years his face had pouched up and swelled. He was a wreck of a good-time boy now, with a soft belly in his T-shirt and eyes usually squeezed shut against the harsh light.

“Them bastards ‘just won’t let up on you,” he repeated.

He was drinking cans of 7-Up. There was about a case of empties scattered all around the apartment. I had never seen him drinking pop before.

“Go bite,” Lynette told him. “I wouldn’t let those MPs get a hold of me. ” She shook her head in my direction. She’d frizzed her hair out in a solid-red halo. “What made you sign with the dumb-shit army anyway?” she asked.

“I had a feeling my mother would have wanted me to,” I said.

They got uncomfortable quiet and gave each other a quick glance.

That’s when I knew they both knew the secret of who my mother was.

They had both known all along. There was too many who had known. Too many for me to hate them one by one. So I just smiled, although my stomach was a churning washer full of dimes.

I was King’s half brother, see, a bastard son of June’s.

The old lady who told me this fact was the one who put the spell on Grandpa Kashpaw in his youth. Some said she caused him, later, to lose his senses. It was Lulu Lamartine-the jab wa witch whose foundation garments was a nightmare cage for little birds.

I’d had a lowdown opinion of Lulu, like most, but I’ll respect her from now on because her motives was correct in telling me.

She made an effort. She told me about June in a simple way that let me know that grownup business was meant.

After she told me I tried, I really did try, to take it all in my grain of thought. But here, as you’ll see in the eventual telling, I met with a failure of the heart. In the end that was the overbearing reason I joined up.

So to go on with the story, I was walking in the hall of the Senior Citizens one day when Lulu opened her door and leaned out beckoning. She had red lacquer on her hooks, bangle jewelry all up her arms, and her head was like a closet of crows. A ragring wig.

“Come on in here,” she said. “Young man we got something to talk about.”

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Lamartine.

I was quite careful. To tell the truth I was afraid of her. She scared people after the bandages came off her eyes, because she seemed to know everybody else’s business. No one understood that like I did.

For you see, having what they call the near-divine healing touch, I know that such things are purely possible. If she had some kind of power, I wasn’t one to doubt.

That time the Defender girl was less than two months pregnant Lulu knew about it just from touching her hand.

When Old Man Bunachi got a mistaken thousand-dollar credit from the government in his social security check, she asked him for a tiding-over loan. He had been keeping it a secret.

What about Germaine? She told Germaine to quit hoarding commodity flour and give it away because there was worms in it.

How do you figure?

Insight. It was as though Lulu knew by looking at you what was the true bare-bone elements of your life. It wasn’t like that before she had the operation on her eyes, but once the bandages come off she saw.

She saw too clear for comfort.

Only Grandma Kashpaw wasn’t one trifle out of current at the insight Lulu showed. She and Lulu was thick as thieves now.

That too was odd. If you’ll just picture them together knowing everybody’s life, as if they had hot lines to everybody’s private thoughts, you’ll know why people started rushing past their doors.

They feared one of them would reach out, grab them into their room, and tell them all the secrets they tried to hide from themselves.

Which is of course just what happened to Lipsha Morrissey.

Lulu grabbed me.

She might be soft and sweet as marshmallows, but in her biceps there was tension steel. She had run her nails beneath my collar, and I was whisked in before I could draw breath to yell.

Clapped right down in her plastic armchair and scared to move for starting a fateful apartment-wide avalanche of sharp-edged ashtrays and painted poodles, I breathed a sigh. Caught but good, I thought. I wasn’t really scared so much as irritated to be treated so abrupt. I was sure I knew all my secrets, see, and hadn’t anything to hide.

But I was wrong. As soon as she’d said,

“I talked this over with your mother long ago,” I knew she was going to tell me something on which I’d shut the door.

And when she said,

“Not your stepmother, not Marie, but your mother in the flesh …” my worst thought was confirmed.

“I don’t want to hear,” I told Lulu flat out. “My real, mother’s Grandma Kashpaw. That’s how I consider her, and why not?

Seeing as my blood mother wanted to tie a rock around my neck and throw me in the slough.”

“that’s what you always been told,” said Lulu calmly.

“Been told?”

Sure enough, I was hooked then. I took her bait.

“What do you mean?”

So she up and spilled the beans.

“You’re nineteen years old now? That makes it twenty years ago this happened. My son Gerry-you know him, in Illinois doing time now-was just out of high school. One day he came home and told he how he’d got his eye set on this beautiful woman,

“She’s got a beautiful shape,” he said. “She has class.” He didn’t say that she was also very bold, or that she was already married, or even that she had a child. He didn’t tell me those facts! He just said,

“Mom I think I’ll marry her.” He presented me with it. The only drawback was she was what you’d call an older woman.

More experienced. But who cares past a certain point anyhows?

People talked, but those two went together and fell in love. Well, the inevitable happened pretty soon. That pretty woman started wearing a big wide tent dress. My boy left. Then I don’t know what happened between them, because, not long after, a little baby was placed in your Grandma Kashpaw’s arms. The woman went back to her husband, Gordie Kashpaw. As you know, they did not live very happily ever after.

Neither did my Gerry. In fact, it looks like you had the best life of them all.”

I couldn’t take it in.

“You went and made this up for laughs,” I said. “I ain’t June Kashpaw’s son.”

“Her father was a Morrissey,” said Lulu, “figure that.”

So I figured. My head felt put on strange. A buzzing sound was starting in the room.

I looked at her, and all of a sudden here was the next odd thing: I saw that Lulu Lamartine and Lipsha Morrissey had the same nose. Hers was little, semi-squashed in, straight and flat. Mine was a bigger, flatter version of hers down to the squashed-in tip. It was like seeing something in a mirror that’s not your face.