Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

“King, baby!” Gordie jumped off the steps and hugged King to the ground with the solid drop of his weight. “It’s her car. You’re June’s boy, King. Don’t cry.” For as they lay there, welded in — Mom shock, King’s face was grinding deep into the cinders and his shoulders shook with heavy sobs. He screamed up through dirt at his father.

“It’s awful to be dead. Oh my God, she’s so cold.”

They were up on their feet suddenly. King twisted out of Gordie’s arms and balanced in a wrestler’s stance. “It’s your fault and you wanna take the car,” he said wildly. He sprang at his — father but Gordie stepped back, bracing himself, and once again he folded King violently into his arms, and again King sobbed and sagged against his father.

Gordic lowered him back into the cinders. While they were clenched, Lynette slipped from the car and ran into the house. I followed her.

She rushed through the kitchen, checked the baby, and then she came back.

“Sit down,” I said. I had taken a chair beside Eli.

“Uh, uh.”

She walked over to Eli. She couldn’t be still.

“You got troubles out there,” he stated.

“Yeah,” she said. “His mom gave him the money!” She sneaked a cigarette from Eli’s pack, giving him a coy smirk in return. “Because she wanted him to have responsibility. He never had responsibility.

She wanted him to take care of his’ family

Eli nodded and pushed the whole pack toward her when she stubbed out the cigarette half smoked. She lit another.

“You know he really must love his uncle,” she cried in a small, hard voice. She plumped down next to Eli and steadily smiled at the blue hat. “That fishing hat. It’s his number-one hat. I got that patch for him. King. They think the world of him down in the Cities.

Everybody knows him. They know him by that hat. It’s his number one.

You better never take it off.”

Eli took the hat off and turned it around in his hands. He squinted at the patch and read it aloud. Then he nodded, as if it had finally dawned on him what she was talking about, and he turned it back around.

“Let me wear it for a while,” Lynette cajoled. Then she took it.

L Put it on her head and adjusted the brim. “There it is.”

Uncle Eli took his old cap off his knee and put it on his head.

“This one fits me,” he said.

In the next room King junior began to cry

“Oh, my baby!” Lynette shrieked as if he were in danger and darted out. I heard her murmuring King’s name when the father and the son walked back inside. King sat down at the table and put his head in his folded arms, breathing hoarsely. Gordie got the keys from Lynette and told Eli they were going home now.

“He’s okay,” Gordie said, nodding at King. “Just as long as you let him alone.”

So they drove off on that clear blue night. I put a blanket around Lynette’s shoulders, and she sank onto the couch. I walked out, past King. He was still breathing hopelessly into his crossed arms. I walked down to where I knew Lipsha was, at the bottom of the hill below the house. Sure enough, he was sitting there, back against a log from the woodpile. He passed me a bottle of sweet ros;, I drank. I tipped the bottle, looked up at the sky, and nearly fell over, in amazement and too much beer, at the drenching beauty.

Northern lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha’s arm. We floated into the field and sank down, crushing green wheat. We chewed the sweet kernels and stared up and were lost. Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green licks of light pulsed and faded across it.

Living lights. Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a Pttern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it.

As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. Or a dance hall.

And all the world’s wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. She would be dancing if there was a dance hall in space. She would be dancing a two-step for wandering souls.

Her long legs lifting and failing. Her laugh an ace. Her sweet perfume the way all grownup women were supposed to smell.

Her amusement at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons.

I had to close my eyes after a while. The mix of beer and rose made my head whirl. The lights, shooting high, made the ground rock underneath me. I waved away the bottle when Lipsha touched my hand with the cold end of it.

“Don’t want no more?”

“Later on,” I said. “Keep talking.”

Lipsha’s voice was a steady bridge over a deep black space of sickness I was crossing. If I ‘just kept listening I knew I’d get past all right.

He was talking about King. His voice was slurred and dreamy.

“I’ll admit that,” he said,

“I’m scared of his mind. You can’t never predict when he’ll turn. Once, a long time ago, we went out hunting gophers. I let him get behind me. You know what he did? He hid in the bushes and took a potshot.”

“Lucky. ” “That’s right. I steer clear of King. I never turn my back on him, either. ” “Don’t be scared of him,” I said. I was managing to keep a slim hold on the conversation. I could do this as long as I only moved my lips and not the rest of me.

Sure. King never took a potshot at you.”

“He’s scared underneath.”

“Of what?” said Lipsha.

But I really didn’t know. “Those vets,” I said, “are really nuts.”

“He’s no vet,” Lipsha began. But then blackness swung too hard, tipping me. For a while I heard nothing, saw nothing, and did not even dare move my lips to speak. That didn’t matter.

Lipsha went on talking.

“Energy,” he said, “electromagnetic waves. It’s because of the temperature, the difference sets them off. ” He was talking about the northern lights. Although he never did well in school, Lipsha knew surprising things. He read books about computers and volcanoes and the life cycles of salamanders. Sometimes he used words I had to ask him the meaning of, and other times he didn’t make even the simplest sense.

I loved him for being both ways. A wash of love swept me over the sickness. I sat up.

“I am going to talk to you about something particular … …I began. My voice was serious, all of a sudden, and it scared him.

He moved away from me, suspicious. I was going to tell him what I’d heard from hanging at the edge of the aunts’ conversations. I was going to tell him that his mother was June. Since so many others knew, it was only right that he should, too.

“Your mother. I began.

“I can never forgive what she done to a little child,” he said.

“They had to rescue me out of her grip.

I tried again.

“I want to talk about your mother ….. Lipsha nodded, cutting me off. “I consider Grandma Kashpaw my mother, even though she just took me In I ike any old stray.”

“She didn’t do that,” I said. “She wanted you.”

“No,” said Lipsha. “Albertine, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Now I was the one who felt ignorant, confused.

“As for my mother,” be went on, “even if she came back right now, this minute, and got down on her knees and said

“Son, I am sorry for what I done to you,” I would not relent on her.

I didn’t know how to rescue my intentions and go on. I thought for a while, or tried to, but sitting up and talking had been too much.

“What if your mother never meant to?” I lay down again, lowering myself carefully into the wheat. The dew was condensing. I was cold, damp, and sick. “What if it was just a kind of mistake?” I asked.