Louise Erdrich - LaRose

So the head began to follow those children. It cried out, My children, wait for me! You are making me cry by leaving me!

Ignatia’s voice was wicked and wheedling. LaRose looked aghast but leaned closer.

Really scary, he said. Keep going.

The little boy was riding on his big brother’s back, and he kept telling his little brother that the head was not really their mother. Yes it is! Yes it is! said the little brother.

My children, my dear children, do not leave me behind , called the head. I beg you!

The little brother wanted to go back to the mother, but the older brother took a piece of punk wood and threw it behind him, calling out, Let there be fire! Far and wide, a fire blazed. But the head kept rolling through fire and began to catch up with them.

The boy threw down a thorn. At once a forest of thorns sprang up, and this time the rolling head was really blocked. But the head called to the brother of the snake, the Great Serpent, and that serpent bit through those thorn trees and made a passage. So it managed to catch up with him.

The brother threw down a stone and up sprang a vast mountain. Yet that rolling head got a beaver with iron teeth to chew down that mountain, and it kept on pursuing the children.

The brothers were very tired by now and threw down a skin of water to make a river. By mistake it landed not behind them, but in front of them. Now they were trapped.

LaRose nodded, caught in the story.

But the Great Serpent took pity on them and let them onto his back. They went across the river. When the rolling head reached the river, it begged to be carried across. The Great Serpent allowed the head to roll onto its back, but halfway across the serpent dumped it off.

Sturgeon will be your name, said the Great Serpent. The head became the first sturgeon.

What is a sturgeon? asked LaRose.

It’s an ugly kind of fish, said Ignatia. Those fish were the buffalo of our people once. They still have them up in the big northern lakes and the rivers.

Okay, said LaRose. So that’s the end?

No. Those two boys wandered around and by accident, the younger boy was left behind. He was all alone.

Now I must turn into a wolf, said the little boy.

That’s interesting, said LaRose. Just to become a wolf.

When his older brother found him, then the two walked together. This older brother became a being who could do many things — some places he is known as Wishketchahk, some as Nanabozho, and he has other names. He was kind of foolish, but also very wise, and his little brother the wolf was always by his side. He made the first people, Anishinaabeg, the first humans.

Huh, said LaRose. So what’s the moral of this story?

Moral? Our stories don’t have those!

Ignatia puffed her cheeks in annoyance.

They call this an origin story, said Malvern, also annoyed, but precise.

Like, ah, like Genesis, said Ignatia. But there’s lots more that happens, including a little muskrat who makes the earth.

And our Nanabozho, he’s like their Jesus, said Malvern.

Kind of like Jesus, said Ignatia. But always farting.

So the rolling head’s like his mom, Mary? And this whole story is like the first story in the Bible?

You could say that.

So our Mary is a rolling head.

A vicious rolling head, said Ignatia.

We are so cool, said LaRose. Still, getting chased like that. Maybe caught. Maybe slammed on the ground. Getting your wind knocked out.

It is about getting chased, said Ignatia, with a long suck on her oxygen. We are chased into this life. The Catholics think we are chased by devils, original sin. We are chased by things done to us in this life.

That’s called trauma, said Malvern.

Thank you , said Ignatia. We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. We only have this teeny moment. Oops, it’s gone!

What’s gone?

Now. Oops, gone again.

Ignatia and Marvern laughed until Ignatia gasped for breath. Oops! Oops! Slippery!

What’s gone?

Now.

Oops, laughed LaRose, slipped past!

And then, just like that, Ignatia died. She gave them a glowing look and her feet kicked straight out. Her head fell back. Her jaw relaxed. Malvern leaned over and with her nurse’s paw pressed the pulse on Ignatia’s neck. Malvern looked aside, frowning, waiting, and at last took her hand from Ignatia’s throat, pushed Ignatia’s jaw back up, and pulled down her eyelids. She then cradled Ignatia’s hand.

Take her other hand, said Malvern. She’s starting out on her journey now. Remember everything I say, LaRose. This will be your job sometime.

Malvern talked to Ignatia, telling her the directions, how to take the first steps, how to look to the west, where to find the road, and not to bother taking anyone along. She said that everybody, even herself, Malvern, who had never told her, loved Ignatia very much. They held Ignatia’s hands for a long time, quietly, until the hands were no longer warm. Still, LaRose felt her presence in the room.

She’ll be around here for a while more, said Malvern. I’m going to get her friends so they can say good-bye too. You go on home now.

LaRose placed Ignatia’s hand upon the armrest of her chair. He put on his coat, walked out the door, down the hall. He went through the airlock doors, then out the double front doors, into the navy-blue frost-haloed air. He was supposed to meet his mother at the school, so he walked along the gravel road and crossed the uncertain pavement, the buckled curb. The cold flowed around him and down the neck of his jacket. His ears stung, but he didn’t put his hood up. He moved his fingers, shoved in his pockets. There were so many sensations in his body that he couldn’t feel them all at once, and each, as soon as he felt it, slipped away into the past.

THE PICTURE DIAGRAM on Romeo’s wall was slowly taking shape, with bits of information plucked forward or pushed back. Romeo’s television had lost sound, but no matter. He only watched the mouths move and read the closed captions. It was better because otherwise their voices, the emphasis they put on certain words, could distort his thinking. He still liked the word yellowcake , and the unknowable place it was from. Niger! But already they were past that. As bright October shifted to the leafless icy dark of November, there was scarier talk of weapons of mass destruction.

Oh please! Everybody in North Dakota lived next door to a weapon of mass destruction. Right down the road, a Minuteman missile stored in its underground silo was marked only by a square of gravel and a chain-link fence above. You passed, wondering who was down there, deep and solitary, insane of course, staring at a screen the way Romeo was staring now, at the mouth of Condoleezza Rice and knowing, as nobody else but Romeo knew, that this was a hungry woman who strictly controlled her appetites. This was a woman so much more intelligent than any of the men around her that she played them with her concert hands like chopsticks on her piano. Even Bulgebrow Cheney with his frighteningly bad teeth — and he must have millions so why could he not get new teeth — even Cheney was her mental slave. Didn’t know it, but he was. Her eyes glittered. Her mouth a deep blood red. She had no feelings for any man. She ate them. Talked of rods. Smoking guns.

Romeo adored her.

Of them all, she was the smartest and most presidential. Could they see it?

From his pockets, he emptied the night’s take onto a cafeteria tray. He went through it meticulously now, pushed aside tiny blue pills, fat white pills, round green pills, oval pink pills. He was quite sure that another clue was hidden in the story he’d heard just that evening about the way a person bled to death from only surface wounds. That fit into the findings somehow. A tack. A placement. A string that would attach the phrase and the possible meaning. He’d cross-medicate, then medicate. It was beautiful, like an art project, this thing he was doing.