Louise Erdrich - LaRose

I do, and I feel guilty, I mean, I love your boy.

Landreaux relaxed at that your boy. He looked at Peter.

I’d give my life to get Dusty back for you, said Landreaux. LaRose is my life. I did the best that I could do.

They righted the chair, the table, and sat again, nodding, but they didn’t drink another beer. Peter put his hand across his face, tipped his chair back, then came back down and looked straight at Landreaux.

As far as that goes, he said carefully, some questions need to be asked.

Let’s ask the questions later, said Landreaux.

He dropped his gaze, pushing slowly away. He was disoriented, suddenly heavy with despair. He’d been waiting for something legal. Legal adoption. He got up and walked out the door. He needed to wait some more.

MRS. PEACE SMILED at the rug. The carpet still smelled like a sweet chemical bouquet. Floating in her gray velveteen recliner, with flowers blooming at her feet. She held the tin on her lap. Almost half a year had gone by without an attack, but her enemy had sneaked in. Billy inhabited her like a wave. She fought him off. The Fentanyl was at its strongest now. Agony that had squeezed her worn old body from heart to gut was releasing her, reluctantly. It didn’t like to let her go. But there, free. Her body blossomed with each easier breath. From her clear paneled doors, Mrs. Peace could see across the snow-swept yard, past a gnarled apple tree and tangled fence line, down the long swoop of field, to the cemetery.

People had started putting sun-powered lawn ornaments alongside the other mementos they left on loved ones’ graves. She and Emmaline had staked quite a few lanterns into the ground in August. A daughter who at birth had almost killed her was down there. Her mother was down there. There was a white stone, fadingly scratched. There were so many relatives and friends down the long hill, people she loved. In an hour the homes of the dead would begin glowing milkily beneath the snow.

Pain relinquished her to dreamy ease. Her mother came to visit, walking up the hill in that old fatally thin coat. She didn’t have to knock on the door, she just came through and sat down, kicking off her galoshes, very nice galoshes trimmed with plush. Curling up on the couch with the peppermint pink afghan, she said, All is calm, all is bright.

I know, said Mrs. Peace. But that yarn was supposed to be a duller and more soothing shade of pink. I misjudged the effect.

At Fort Totten boarding school, I had a dress this color in a white and blue calico print. Well, it wasn’t the dress, which was gray like all the dresses. Just the sash. We sometimes got to wear a sash or a scrap of color in our hair. Special occasions only. After all, it was military. From a military post to an industrial military school.

I still think of you every day, said Mrs. Peace. I just have these few pictures, but I memorized your pictures. I looked at you a lot.

Her mother shivered in the afghan.

Can you turn up the heat?

Here, just watch!

LaRose had a can-snatcher, an elongated grasping tool. She used it to turn the dial on the wall. Her mother cried out with pleasure.

Pretty soon that’s going to feel so good!

I’ll make you tea.

They don’t let us have tea. We had milk. Porridge and blue milk. What’s left when all the cream is skimmed off, eh? We drank that. The bell rang. It was always the bells. All we did was to the bells. Pretty soon you started hearing them all the time.

I still hear them.

Bang around in your head, eh?

Like a feast day.

Goodness, my girl. I feel that heat coming on. The cold sinks into my bones down there, like always. That first year, they took away my blanket, my little warm rabbit blanket. They took away my fur-lined makazinan. My traditional dress and all. My little shell earrings, necklace. My doll. She’s still down there in that souvenir case, eh? They sold things our family sent along with us for souvenirs. Traded them. You wonder.

What they did!

I know! With all the braids they cut off, boys’ and girls’, across the years.

There was hundreds of children from all over as far as Fort Berthold, so hundreds and hundreds of braids those first years. Where did the braids go?

Into our mattresses? We slept on our hair, you think?

Or if they burned our hair you would remember the smell.

But with our hair off, we lost our power and we died.

Look at this picture, said Mrs. Peace. Rows and rows of children in stiff clothing glowered before a large brick building.

Look at those little children. Those children sacrificed for the rest of us, my view. Tamed in itchy clothes.

These kind of pictures are famous. They used them to show we could become human.

The government? They were going for extermination then. That Wizard of Oz man, yes? You have his clipping.

LaRose drew out bits and scraps of paper, newsprint.

Here.

THE ABERDEEN SATURDAY PIONEER , 1888

BY FRANK BAUM

. . the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are Masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit is broken, their manhood effaced, better that they die than live as the miserable wretches they are.

1891

BY FRANK BAUM

. . our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth.

Oh well, said Mrs. Peace, here we are. It’s a wonder.

This ain’t Oz, said her mother.

Looks like Oz down in your graveyard. All those green glowy lights.

No poppies there in winter.

I’ve got better stuff in here.

Mrs. Peace rummaged around. Under all of the papers and mementos in the rose tin, she kept her Fentanyl patches — white with green lettering, in translucent pouches. She was extremely careful with their use. She was supposed to keep ahead of the pain, but she didn’t like to get too cloudy. She let the pain crank her up until she could think of nothing else. Her patches gave the medicine out in a slowly timed release. The amount she took now would have killed her years ago.

Exterminate or educate.

Just take the pain away, she said.

It was good we became teachers so we could love those kids.

There was good teachers, there was bad teachers. Can’t solve that loneliness.

It sets deep in a person.

Goes down the generations, they say. Takes four generations.

Maybe finally worked itself out with the boy.

LaRose.

Could be he’s finally okay.

It’s possible.

The recliner went plushier. The air dripped with sound. Watery streams of soft noise rushed along her sides. She put out her arms. Her mother took her hands. They drifted. This is how she visited with her mother, who had died of tuberculosis like her mother and grandmother. It was a disease of infinite cruelty that made a mother pass it to her children before she died. Mrs. Peace had not died of her mother’s tuberculosis. She had been in the sanitarium in 1952, the year isoniazid and its various iterations astonishingly cured the incurable.

I was sure that I would die like you. So I tried not to get attached to anything or anyone. You are numb for years, she said to her mother, then you begin to feel. At first it is a sickening thing. To feel seems like having a disease. But you get used to sensations over time.