Louise Erdrich - LaRose

LaRose.

The picture of those small capable boy hands now fills Peter. Those hands curving to accept the bullets. Loading and unloading his gun. And the ropes, the poisons. Those hands taking them from their places and getting rid of them. The missing rat poison, strychnine, the missing bleach. LaRose saving him now, saving both his fathers.

Well, Landreaux. Peter turns from the murderer. Landreaux doesn’t need any help to die. Let him hoof out his dread alone. Let him walk. Peter will be the only one who knows he pulled the trigger. The knowledge engulfs him. There is a slough glittering in the new air. Peter walks to the edge, runs, hops, and tosses the rifle like a spear toward the sun-sequined water.

As it crashes in, he feels one moment of lightness. He lifts his arms. He holds his arms up waiting for the energy of absolution. Nothing comes. Nothing falls from the warm, sunny, ordinary sky except the same knowledge. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He killed Landreaux. Nothing happened.

FAR OFF, DOWN the broad county gravel road, Father Travis spots a small figure moving along the ditch. When he recognizes Landreaux, he feels the cold tension leave his arms. Weakness, so foreign he doesn’t know what he is feeling, washes down his body, from his heart, draining his nerves. He pulls over and switches off the engine. His heart is still vibrating, his nerves on alert. Whatever happened, Landreaux is right there in front of him.

A dissonance in his thinking surfaces.

Along with his relief, there is a bizarre disappointment related to the fleeting thoughts that passed through his mind, rejected, but popping up again. Basically, what if. What if Landreaux was just gone. What if, well, it meant he was dead. Okay. What if Landreaux was dead. Forget what would happen to everybody else.

What if Landreaux was dead and Emmaline needed me now.

What if there was no Landreaux, just Emmaline, what if.

All along the road these thoughts had come and gone, but Father Travis had not reacted to them. It was seeing Landreaux, kicking along the road, shambling toward him, that made the thoughts real.

Not that he’d asked for the thoughts. Sure, he’d rejected and rejected, but the thoughts had come into his mind again and again. He clenched his hands on the steering wheel and lowered his head, shut his eyes. Everything was all right because Landreaux was alive, but he’d had those thoughts.

Who are you?

Father Travis addressed himself in a small voice, in a whispery voice. He looked up. Landreaux still walking toward him. Larger. Larger.

I could still run him over, said Father Travis to the windshield.

After a hopeless moment, watching the big man trudge toward him, Father Travis felt the wildness burst from a space below his heart. The sound came out weird. Like a jackal. Something in a zoo. He didn’t recognize this sound he was making until it looped into a kind of laughter.

I could hit the gas!

He was still laughing when Landreaux got to him. When Landreaux opened the passenger door. Father Travis took a look at Landreaux’s big ol’ sad-sack face, exactly the face Romeo had described, and gave a sobbing guffaw. Slammed his hand on the steering wheel. Laughed and laughed.

Landreaux shut the door and kept walking.

He made it home around dark with questions still rattling in his head. Did Peter really try to kill me? Or was he just putting fear into me? Father Travis? Was it all a joke and what was true? Josette had put a wobbly tin fence up along the side of the house, and he caught his foot. Nearly fell up the steps. So maybe Emmaline, sitting at the kitchen table, thought for a moment he was drunk, but when he walked in she knew he was just clumsy.

Whatever the answers to the heavy questions were, he was weightless now. He’d got lighter and lighter all the way home until suddenly, at the doorway, he’d lifted off the ground, kicking off his shoes at the door. He went straight to her, bent over and put his arms around his wife sitting in the chair. She put her hand up and held his arm. The kitchen light was harsh. She closed her eyes and leaned back. He pushed his chin lightly along the crown of her head.

You smell like outside, she said.

She kept her hand on his arm, frail gesture. Hardly the way a woman treats her husband when she’s become aware that it might be her cousin Zack who comes to the door. Hardly. Something, though. The hand on his arm hardly represented what had been their passionate marriage, their once-upon-a-reservation storybook time. She just held his arm. He leaned over her, his elbows on the back of the chair. Leaning wasn’t much, when compared to how they used to push a chair under the doorknob in a cheap motel where the lock was broken. They used to think they were something special. Lucky. They used to say they were sure nobody else had ever been this happy, ever been this much in love. They used to say, We will get old together. Will you still love me when I’m shriveled up? I will love you even better. You’ll be sweeter. Like a raisin. Or a prune. We’ll be eating prunes together. That’s the way they used to talk. But now they were tasting the goddamn green plums, weren’t they. Bitter. What about me? Will you love me? I don’t know, it depends on where you shrivel up. That’s the way they used to talk.

Landreaux straightened up and got two glasses of water. He sat down in another chair. Emmaline felt a surge of fear that suddenly contained what might be, could be, identified as possibility. She took a drink of water and closed her eyes. She saw a slough thick with reeds, muck bottom, tangled, both deep and shallow. She saw the ducks batter their way across and up. She saw herself, Landreaux beside her. She saw them both wade in together.

WHEN FATHER TRAVIS returned to the church grounds, having spoken to Peter Ravich, having made Peter read the coroner’s report, the new priest was there. He was wearing an elaborate medieval priest outfit with chain for a belt and shoes that looked like carpet slippers. He was from a newly formed order. He was young, with a creamy complexion, apple-blossom cheeks, bright cornflower eyes, and corn-silk hair cropped to the skull. His voice was startling, high-pitched, but commanding of attention all the same.

I suppose you’re Father Travis, said the new priest. A frowning flush mottled his cheeks.

I suppose I am, said Father Travis.

I am Father Dick Bohner.

Oh no, thought Father Travis.

I am your replacement, said Father Bohner.

You should go by Richard here, said Father Travis.

Dick is my name, said the new priest fiercely.

Of course it is, said Father Travis.

Things will be changing around here, said Father Bohner, flushing still more violently. Saturday mass should have started ten minutes ago.

You’re late then, said Father Travis.

Father Travis walked away to pack his suitcases. He had come with two hard-sided Samsonite cases. Somehow, in the packing, he found that he had downsized. He had only enough to fill one suitcase. His cash, what there was of it, was in a bag behind a loose ceiling tile. He called Randall Lafournais, who drove down to Fargo every week, and arranged a ride with him. Father Travis decided to get off in one of the train stop towns, buy a ticket on the Empire Builder to Fargo, Minneapolis, Chicago, and then continue on east by train and south by bus to Jacksonville, North Carolina, and Camp Lejeune. He would walk down the boulevard among the memorial trees. He would visit the broken wall and touch the names engraved there.

As he was folding clothes, he realized that after all he had very little money. The phone rang. He let it ring and then pounced suddenly, brimming over, laughing.