Louise Erdrich - LaRose

So you know that Landreaux Iron had relapsed that day. Yes! Romeo raises his hand, testifying. We know he’s struggled, and he’s fought, and I more than anyone understand that. Acknowledge it, Father Travis. I more than anyone dislike bearing unpleasant news. But, yes, it takes a strength of character. Even if Landreaux had that strength, which I know he does, Father Travis, because I know Landreaux well, even so there are times. This was one of the times. His shot blasted a tree branch, splintered it, and the boy was struck as with shrapnel. But shallow wounds, many of them, here, here, here, etc. Not one of these wounds hit a major vein or artery. The cause of death, exsanguination. However, had Landreaux not fled the scene he might have stopped that bleeding. Had he not overpowered the boy’s mother, she might have reached her son in time to stop the bleeding. This boy might be alive. I made copies of the coroner’s report, which bears this out. It is signed by Mighty Georgie herself, yes, Georgie Mighty, unavailable right now, most sadly, or she herself could bear this out as it was also corroborated by the state coroner, who happened to be in the area and was called in on this case, so yes. Most sadly. .

Romeo drifts a bit, then rouses himself, riffles in his pocket, draws out the report.

Father Travis puts his hand out, takes the paper. He reads the paper. He holds it long enough to read it several times over. At last he lifts his eyes to meet Romeo’s dozing-off eyes.

It doesn’t say that.

Romeo blinks.

It doesn’t say that.

Romeo sits up in his chair, mouth clamped.

I put it all together! Romeo speaks firmly. Father Travis!

It doesn’t say that, Romeo. The words you used are written here, but they don’t add up to your story. It just doesn’t say that.

Please don’t take this away from me. This is my only thing!

He peers stubbornly at Father Travis.

You are mistaken! Romeo slaps his knees. Mistaken!

Romeo rounds up all of the scattered bits of who he is, or was, and flings them on the table.

Father Travis, he says with authority, I gathered every word from trusted sources. I assembled the whole report from pieces of information relayed to me by people who were on the ground that day. That terrible day. Even if the report doesn’t say exactly what I said, there is corroboration. It’s not like I wanted to find these things out.

These things aren’t things. Father Travis gestures at the paper. They’re not here.

These words, these connections, these facts. They fell into place. Little by little. They added up! Into an inevitable story. I made diagrams. I procured a box of tacks. Tacks were in my wall. Still there. I drew lines between words and then elided. . do you know that word? The meaning of that word?

Yes.

Don’t you love that word? I fit these connections to other connections until a huger connection emerged.

What are you talking about? Elide doesn’t mean that. It means erase.

Or slur together!

Yes, like when you’re drunk, slurring, erasing part of your word.

Well, says Romeo, maybe. Erased the meanings between the salient points. Could have.

And then what?

And then, and then, well. Peter Ravich was there in the Alco parking lot, okay?

Romeo searches his hands, polishes his wrist, and tells Father Travis every detail of what he’d told Peter Ravich. He is still talking when Father Travis gets up. Romeo keeps talking after Father Travis walks through the door. Keeps on talking to the empty coffeepot and waiting chairs, to the walls, to the sun shafts through basement window, to the food smells, to the hands, the knees, the air. Keeps on talking because once he finishes he does not know what will happen next, what awaits him anywhere in his own life, and because he cannot leave with these embarrassing sheets of snot and tears still running down off his face. He stands to follow Father Travis, still talking. Climbs upstairs and through the center aisle of the church, still talking, too stunned at himself to genuflect. Steps out the front door of the church.

From there, he can see down the hill into the marrow of the reservation town. High and mentally blasted as he is, he sees into each heart. Pain is dotted all around, glowing from the deep chest wells of his people. To the west the hearts of the dead still pulse, burning soft and green in their caskets. They stream out pale light from the earth. And to the south there are the buffalo that the tribe has bought for tourism purposes. A darkly gathered congregation. Their hearts also on fire with the dreadful message of their extinction. Their ghostly gathering now. Like us, a symbol of resistance, thinks Romeo. Like us, now rambling around in a little pen of hay getting fat. Like us, their hearts visible as lamps in the dust. To the east, also, the holy dawn of all the earth, every morning of every day, the promise and the weariness. He is so tired, Romeo. Because of course Peter will kill Landreaux. He saw this, has always known it. He doesn’t want to look north because he realizes he’s thought in the counterclockwise fashion that belongs only to the spirit world, where, it appears to him now, he belongs. His place of rest.

So thoroughly relieved and convinced is Romeo in that instant, and so fully does it seize him, the idea of his death, that he casts himself violently headlong down the twenty cement church steps, to the very base.

FATHER TRAVIS DROVE the parish outing van along the BIA road across to County 27 and pulled into the Ravich driveway. Landreaux’s Corolla was parked to one side of the drive, and Peter’s pickup was gone. Nola came out the front door and stood on the fussy little stone pathway to the drive, hands on her hips, full makeup, brightly frosted hair, immaculate pale outfit. She held his gaze pleasantly. As if she’d never seen him before.

Hello? Can I help you?

Is Peter home?

No.

I need to speak to him right away.

Nola gave him a suspicious flounce, and called Maggie. She came out, also smartly dressed.

What’s wrong?

Maggie could tell immediately that everything was not all right. Not all right again. And she had tried so hard with the family photograph! But clearly, something had happened with her dad. He’d acted weird the whole way back. And now the old Vin Diesel priest.

Can you tell me where your dad went?

I’ll look around, she said to Father Travis. Just wait.

Maggie walked through the house with her radar on. Her mother kept everything so exactly in its exact place that Maggie could always feel, before she even saw, what was different about a room.

Maggie came back outside.

He took his best deer rifle.

Thank you, said Father Travis.

WAYLON DROVE UP just after Father Travis left, and Maggie turned off her radar, right there in the driveway, where he met her. She had asked him over to help her work in the cornfield. Peter had plowed last year’s stubble into the field, but there were already weeds up in the rows. She went inside, and changed into work clothes, put on SP 30 and came out. Together, they walked to the field. It was warm. They each had a hoe they’d keep sharp using the files stuck in the back pockets of their jeans. Maggie’s were short cutoffs. She was a faster or more indifferent weed killer, so she got ahead of Waylon right away. He left a few pickers in the black dirt and stumbled after her. Maggie’s white shirt was tied off at her belly. Her foal’s legs shot down into thick socks, heavy tie boots. A battered straw cowboy hat shaded her face. Her lips were moving to some song in her head. Both of them had heavy brown cotton gloves in their back pockets but they swung their hoes bare-handed. The scent of dry crushed plants, torn dirt, piercing and pure, followed them over the earth. Waylon was proud of his shoes — Jordans — which he shouldn’t have been wearing in the field. His dad had bought them and didn’t have the money. He’d had to sign something to get them — but he wanted people to know that Waylon’s family could afford them. Fine dirt was sifting into the shoes and his sweating feet turned the dust to paste. He kept on swinging the hoe, slicing off pickers, shuffling along behind Maggie in his pasty shoes. One moment he was thinking about washing the shoes out later with a hose, or maybe a wet cloth, and if he would ruin them. The next moment everything changed.