Louise Erdrich - LaRose

After Landreaux had left, Peter lay on the living room carpet, staring at the ceiling fan. Hands on his forehead, stomach whirling with the blades. He wasn’t a man to make friends, and it was hard, this thing with Landreaux. Peter was six foot two, powerful because he worked the farm, but weak, too, in the ankles, in the knees, in the wrists and neck. Wherever one part of his body met up with another part, it hurt. Still, it was his method to suck it up. High school coaches had taught him that. This was his family’s farm before the family died off, except for one now Floridian brother he’d bought out. Peter’s family were Russian-German immigrants, there long enough to have picked buffalo bones off the land.

When he is feeling well, Peter throws LaRose and Maggie in the air. Falling, they catch the smile on his cool, Slavic face. He rises at 5:00 a.m. and goes to bed at midnight. He works those other jobs, plus the farm, yet there is so much left over. Nola, he met in Fargo. They both went to NDSU and it was a surprise they’d never run into each other in small-town Pluto — a raw little place with a few old buildings, a struggling grocery, some gift shops, a Cenex, and a new Bank of the West. Peter’s family had farmed outside of town and Nola’s mother, Marn, had lived there as a child — they sometimes visited the land she had leased out. Once things became too difficult after Billy Peace died, she had moved with the kids to Fargo. Made them go by their second names because of certain people.

From the beginning, Peter was crazy about Nola. She was tensile and finely made. Her hair was dirty blond, though she bleached it brighter. It turned brownish in the winter if she let it go, exactly his shade. Her face was cheerleader-cute and dainty, but her eyes were slant and calculating. She was elusive, sliding away into her thoughts. No matter how much energy he expended he couldn’t catch her. He couldn’t even find her when she was right in front of him. Sometimes her merciless dark eyes gave nothing back. Her face shut. She was a blank wall, fresh painted. He groped to find a secret hinge. It sprung sometimes in bed and she was alive to him with radiant warmth, her face rosy and gentle, her eyes merry with affection. That was real, wasn’t it? He couldn’t tell anymore.

How would he give her the news? The plan that he and Landreaux had agreed upon. Sharing the upbringing of LaRose — a casual arrangement month by month that the men would set up, it being too loaded otherwise. He would tell her carefully. He would tell her in the barn. Then Nola could react however. Peter had become adept at maintaining an inner equilibrium during the screaming, shouting, foul shouting, rage, sorrow, misery, fury, whimper-weeping, fear, frothing, foaming, singing, praying, and then the ordinary harrowing peace that followed.

Sometimes now in the ordinary peace they made love. It wasn’t mean like the first time. He was not forgiven, but he was accepted. As an asshole, maybe, but one who would not hurt her again. Okay, slug me, he had told her every time she was on top. No thanks, she always said, it will make us even. Their love was quiet, maybe tender, maybe odd or maybe fake. She hummed while she sucked his cock. But now she hummed actual tunes. The next day he’d remember the melody as sly and mocking, though he couldn’t name the words. Her glow of sweet responsive warmth sank into him like radiation. Sometimes it strengthened him. Sometimes he felt it poisoning his bones.

After he and Landreaux spoke of raising LaRose together, it was as if she knew. Nola came to Peter deliciously needy. Afterward, she nestled against him, pushing him around to get comfortable. No way he was going to tell her then. Maybe in the morning, he thought. After Maggie went to school.

You dove, he said. He stroked her shoulder all one way, like feathers.

A mean dove. Who will peck out your heart, she said.

That would hurt.

I can’t help myself. Will you stay with me, she said, suddenly, if I go crazy?

There was desolation in her voice, so he tried to joke.

Well, you already are crazy.

He felt tears on his chest. Oh, he’d gone too far.

In a good way. I love your crazy!

How come you’re not crazy?

I am, inside.

No, you’re not. You’re not crazy. How can you not go crazy? We lost him. How can you not go crazy? Don’t you fucking care?

Her voice rose sharper, louder.

You don’t fucking care! You cold bitch, you Nazi. You don’t care!

Hey, he said, holding her. Both of us can’t go crazy. At the same time, anyway. Let’s take turns.

She went silent, then abruptly laughed.

Bitch. Nazi.

She laughed harder. Her laughing slipped a bolt in Peter, and then they were both laughing in a sick way, both unhinged again with the same first anguish, both weeping into each other’s hair, snot dripping in the sheets.

You’re still my dove, he said, later on. I’ll never stop loving you.

But she terrified him, freezing his love, and he could hear the death of certainty in what he said. The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.

Later still, waking in the dark, he put his hand on her skin, sleepily wishing his strange old wish, that he could dissolve into her, be her, that they could be one creature rocking in the dark.

Yes, wearily, as he drifted again toward sleep. All this and he still had to give her the news tomorrow. Not in the house where LaRose could hear, but out in the barn. It might drive her dangerously past crazy, at first, to share LaRose, but it had to be. He couldn’t bear the weird indecency of what he felt they were doing to the child.

Nola was fine when he told her and fine for days after. She’d expected it. She was all right, until she saw the mouse, not that she was afraid of it. But when you saw one, that meant ten thousand had already invaded. It was in the entryway to the garage. She cornered and tried to stomp it, but the mouse popped from under her shoe. That steamed her up. She was not alone at the house that day but Maggie and LaRose were out in the yard. She had just made sure. They were not allowed to leave the yard and knew she would check on them every fifteen minutes. Nola stood in the little mudroom between the house and the garage. She rarely went into the garage — it was Peter’s place, his workshop. She hardly drove anywhere, but when she did he moved the car out for her. Since he’d taken the extra jobs, he did not spend much time out in the garage.

She entered and was hit immediately, loathsomely, with the sour fug of mice. She backed out, stood in the entry gulping fresh air, then swallowed a giant breath, flipped the lights on, and walked back in. There was a swirling sound, a sense of invisible motion. Tiny black mouseshit seeds covered Peter’s workbench. The bucket of rags. She ran back out to the entryway, breathed, saved another deep breath, and walked in again. Maybe there was grain in the bottom of the bucket. Something had drawn them. Maybe he’d left some of his prep food unsealed. But everything looked fairly neat because he wasn’t a man to make a mess, thank god, even in his own space. She opened the first of the bank of lockers that he used to stash his tall tools — the long-handled clippers, his ax, spades, and the small shovels. What she saw made her forget she was holding her breath.

On the locker’s top shelf, there was a cardboard gilt cake plate, lots of mouseshit, and birthday candles, nibbled. Same thing in the next locker, the next and next, except in one there was her good yellow Tupperware container. She had missed that container. The mice hadn’t gotten to the cake inside, although a few squares that Peter had eaten out of duty were missing. She’d lightly tinted the frosting yellow, like the container, and made some flowers out of purple icing. It wasn’t a complicated cake. It had the children’s names on it. She pulled it out and held it for a while. Then she lifted out a light, dry piece, touched her tongue to it, and took a bite. It tasted of nothing. She stood cradling the yellow container on the curve of her left arm, and ate the rest of the cake, the flowers, the names, even the black-tipped candles that discouraged the mice. She licked her finger and pressed up the crumbs. When the yellow container was entirely clean, she walked back into the kitchen and washed it in hot, soapy water. The sugar would jangle her nerves, she thought, but it didn’t. It slowed her heart. A dopey, fuzzy wash of pleasure covered her and she nearly blanked out before she made it to the couch.