Louise Erdrich - LaRose

She backpedaled, pouted out her lips, manufactured a startled look. Her gaze flickered away as she realized the priest might call Peter.

That’s not what I meant?

Father Travis took a drink of coffee. He stared at her from under his brows. He couldn’t tell how much of what she said was bullshit. Suicide to him seemed an affront to his friends who had died in Beirut. They had wanted to live, made the most of their lives, died for nothing — except he hadn’t. So maybe he was still on this earth to honor 241 lost destinies. This thought hardened his emotions. His fist clenched and unclenched.

Let’s talk about Maggie.

What about her?

Father Travis frowned steadily and Nola dropped her eyes like a sullen girl.

She seems to be adjusting. They all are. I am the only one not adjusting. I came to talk about myself.

Okay, let’s talk about you as the mother of Maggie. If you in any way are self-destructive, you’ll take her down with you, Nola. Do you get that?

Nola cocked her head. She looked ready to stick out her tongue. This was going horribly, horribly, the priest treating her like an appendage to her family. Like a nothing. Not listening.

I don’t really want to talk about her, Father Travis!

Why?

She’s oppositional. Nola’s face worked. Suddenly she began to cry, groping for a tissue. Father Travis pushed the roll of towels at her. She choked on her tears; they became too real. It could be that Maggie was the key to her unhappiness, her inability to process the grief. She’s a little bitch, Nola whispered into the paper towel.

Father Travis heard.

Nola shook the tears from her eyes and cleared her face. I’m sorry, Father. Maybe things should feel normal. Maybe I should be doing normal things. I should get used to the way things are. Accept and accept. Stop thinking about Dusty.

Father Travis got up and walked around the desk.

It’s normal to think about Dusty, he said.

He stood behind her and spoke at the fluffy top of her head. It was perhaps here that he should have held back, waited. But Nola’s fake flirtatiousness felt like mockery.

It’s not normal to do what you did at Mass, he said. You struck Maggie.

She turned hotly. I did not!

Father Travis stared her down, but it was difficult. Her prettiness was a deflecting foil. She was tougher than his AA crowd.

If Peter comes to me about your treatment of Maggie, if Maggie comes herself, if anybody from the Iron family, or a teacher, anyone, comes to me about it? I’ll go to Social Services.

You really would do that?

Nola spoke sobbingly, but her face tightened in rage. She bolted up with such a slick, sudden movement that her breast bobbed into Father Travis’s fingers. He flinched as if scorched.

Nola stepped backward, her wide eyes marveling.

I don’t think you meant what you just said, about Social Services, Father Travis. I’m going to pretend you didn’t touch my bosom. Nola dimpled, eyes hard.

He looked at her and did something he was later ashamed of. He laughed. Bosom? He shooed her out, breaking into guffaws.

Hey Stan! he yelled into the hallway. The church janitor turned, broom in hand. Listen! Mrs. Ravich is going to pretend I tried to cop a feel.

Yeah, okay, Stan said, and kept sweeping.

You’re not the first who tried that, said Father Travis when she turned to him, furious, injured. You should know I don’t touch anybody like that. I am not one of those kinds of priests.

She began to weep for real, then tottered away from him bowlegged in her high heels.

LANDREAUX AND EMMALINE’S house contained the original cabin from 1846, built in desperation as snow fell on their ancestors. It satisfied them both to know that if the layers of drywall and plaster were torn away from the walls, they would find the interior pole and mud walls. The entire first family — babies, mothers, uncles, children, aunts, grandparents — had passed around tuberculosis, diphtheria, sorrow, endless tea, hilarious and sacred, dirty, magical stories. They had lived and died in what was now the living room, and there had always been a LaRose.

After a time, an extension had been built onto the original cabin. Those log huts had become one house during the 1920s, when Emmaline’s grandfather had bought board lumber, sided the house, then shingled it under one roof. During the fifties a lean-to built alongside the house was insulated and became a set of bedrooms. Up until the 1970s, they had used an outhouse, hauled water, washed with a wringer washer, tubs, a washboard. The bathroom and a tiny laundry room completed the house.

During the next ten years, Emmaline had lived there with her mother. When there were too many children and Emmaline had her degree, Mrs. Peace had moved into the Elders Lodge. From her small bedroom, where Emmaline and Landreaux now slept, a door led into the bathroom. Josette and Snow took long baths there and did their complex beauty routines, sending their brothers to the old outhouse when they banged on the door.

The kitchen and living room, the oldest parts of the house, still bore the fifties wallpaper. It rippled under layers of paint — first dark green, then light green, then a blue-gray color chosen by Snow. It was never approved of by Josette, so she got her way with the bargain wallpaper in their shared bedroom — bouquets of lavender flowers tied up with floating white ribbons. Nobody had ever thought about the paint in the boys’ room — it was ancient red papered over with ripped posters of Ninja Turtles, Sitting Bull, Batman, Tupac, Chief Little Shell, Destiny’s Child, and The Sixth Sense.

Back during the eighties the entire house had levitated. Jacked up, set on top of a cinder-block foundation, it was freed of creeping rot and damp. It became a real house then, with a narrow crawl space under. When Emmaline married Landreaux, he built a small deck to formalize the front entrance — a landing big enough for two lawn chairs and a flowerpot that sprouted grass. Once this was accomplished, the house looked suddenly like many houses and Landreaux imagined the two of them getting old there, sitting on that deck, watching the occasional car pass through a rift in the trees beside the road, waiting for their children, then their grandchildren, to exit the school bus and climb toward the house through the grassy wildflowered ditch, across the strip of beat-down weeds, or now, in winter, up the plowed frozen gravel.

It will be all right. We will get old here together after all.

This was Landreaux’s thought the first time Peter dropped off LaRose. They would be together through spring and summer into the dog days, when the house heated through, and the old logs deep inside gave off the earthen scent of loam.

Landreaux opened the door and LaRose ran straight past him, clutching his stuffed creature, shouting for his mom. Landreaux turned back to wave good-bye, but Peter had quickly swung back out onto the road. Landreaux closed the aluminum storm door and then pushed the wooden door shut behind it. To see LaRose and Emmaline fly together would hurt, so he bent over by the mud rug and took a long time pairing up the scattered shoes and setting them in lines. When he finally came to them, his long arms dangling, they were talking about how to use the potato peeler.

LaRose sat down at the table by the window, in feeble winter sunlight. The edges of the storm window were thick with frost. Steam had frozen in gray fuzz upon the sides and sills. He peeled the potato skin away from himself, bit by skimpy bit, onto a plastic plate. Emmaline shook chunks of meat in a bag with flour, then pinched up each chunk and dropped it carefully into hot grease. The cast-iron skillet was smooth and light from fifty years of hard use. Her mother had left it.