Love Medicine (26 page)

It hits me, anyway. Them geese, they mate for life. And I think to myself, ‘just what if I went out and got a pair? And just what if I fed some part-say the goose heart-of the female to Grandma and Grandpa ate the other heart? Wouldn’t that work?

Maybe it’s all invisible, and then maybe again it’s magic. Love is a stony road. We know that for sure. If it’s true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say, then we’d be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn’t harm nobody anyway.

I thought it was worth my effort, and Grandma Kashpaw thought so, too.

She had always known a good idea when she heard one. She borrowed me Grandpa’s gun.

So I went out to this particular slough, maybe the exact same slough I never got thrown in by my mother, thanks to Grandma Kashpaw, and I hunched down in a good comfortable pile of rushes. I got my gun loaded up. I ate a few of these soft baloney sandwiches Grandma made me for lunch. And then I waited.

The cattails blown back and forth above my head. Them stringy blue herons was spearing up their prey. The thing I know how to do best in this world, the thing I been training for all my life, is to wait.

Sitting there and sitting there was no hardship on me. I got to thinking about some funny things that happened. There was this one time that Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it, flown up inside her dress and got lost within there. I recalled her running out into the hallway trying to yell something, shaking. She was doing a right good jig there, cutting the rug for sure, and the thing is it never flown out. To this day people speculate where it went. They fear she might perhaps of crushed it in her corsets. It sure hasn’t ever yet been seen alive. I thought of funny things for a while, but then I used them up, and strange things that happened started weaseling their way into my mind, I got to thinking quite naturally of the Larriartine’s cousin named Wristwatch.

I never knew what his real name was. They called him Wristwatch because he got his father’s broken wristwatch as a young boy when his father passed on. Never in his whole life did Wristwatch take his father’s watch off. He didn’t if it worked, although after a while he got sensitive when care people asked what time it was, teasing him. He often put it to his ear like he was listening to the tick. But it was broken for good and forever, people said so, at least that’s what they thought.

Well I saw Wristwatch smoking in his pickup one afternoon and by nine that evening he was dead.

He died sitting at the Larriartine’s table, too. As she told it, Wristwatch had just eaten himself a good-size dinner and she said would he take seconds on the hot dish when he fell over to the floor. They turnt him over. He was gone. But here’s the strange thing: when the Senior Citizen’s orderly took the pulse he noticed that the wristwatch Wristwatch wore was now working. The moment he died the wristwatch started keeping perfect time.

They buried him with the watch still ticking on his arm.

I got to thinking. What if some grave diggers dug up Wristwatch’s casket in two hundred years and that watch was still going? I thought what question they would ask and it was this: Whose hand wound it?

I started shaking like a piece of grass at just the thought.

Not to get off the subject or nothing. I was still hunkered in the slough. It was passing late into the afternoon and still no honkers had touched down. Now I don’t need to tell you that the waiting did not get to me, it was the chill. The rushes was very soft, but damp.

I was getting cold and debating to leave, when they landed. Two geese swimming here and there as big as life, looking deep into each other’s little pinhole eyes. just the ones I was looking for. So I lifted Grandpa’s gun to my shoulder and I aimed perfectly, and blam! Manz! I delivered two accurate shots. But the thing is, them shots missed. I couldn’t hardly believe it. Whether it was that the stock had warped or the barrel got bent some ways I don’t quite know, but anyway them geese flown off into the dim sky, and Lipsha Morrissey was left there in the rushes with evening fallen and his two cold hands empty. He had before him just the prospect of another day of bone-cracking chill in them rushes, and the thought of it got him depressed.

Now it isn’t my style, in no way, to get depressed.

So I said to myself, Lipsha Morrissey, you’re a happy SOB.

who could be covered up with weeds by now down at the bottom of this slough, but instead you’re alive to tell the tale. You might have problems in life, but you still got the touch. You got the power, Lipsha Morrissey. Can’t argue that. So put your mind to it and figure out how not to be depressed.

I took my advice. I put my mind to it. But I never saw at the time how my thoughts led me astray toward a tragic outcome none could have known.

I ignored all the danger, all the limits,

“A

for I was tired of sitting in the slough and my feet were numb. My face was aching. I was chilled, so I played with fire. I told myself love medicine was simple. I told myself the old superstitions was just that-strange beliefs. I told myself to take the ten dollars Mary MacDonald had paid me for putting the touch on her arthritis joint, and the other five I hadn’t spent yet from winning bingo last Thursday. I told myself to go down to the Ked Owl store.

And here is what I did that made the medicine backfire. I took

“I

shortcut. I looked at birds that was dead and froze.

an evi All right. So now I guess you will say,

“Slap a malpractice suit on Lipsha Morrissey.”

I heard of those suits. I used to think it was a color clothing quack doctors had to wear so you could tell them from the good ones.

Now I know better that it’s law.

As I walked back from the Red Owl with the rock-hard, heavy turkeys, I argued to myself about malpractice. I thought of faith. I thought to myself that faith could be called belief against the odds and whether or not there’s any proof. How does that sound? I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that’s not saying it’s not there. And that is faith for you. It’s belief even when the goods don’t deliver. Higher Power makes promises we all know they can’t back up, but anybody ever go and slap an old malpractice suit on God? Or the U. S. government? No they don’t. Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through. So what I’m heading at is this. I finally convinced myself that the real actual power to the love medicine was not the goose heart itself but the faith in the cure.

I didn’t believe it, I knew it was wrong, but by then I had waded so far into my lie I was stuck there. And then I went one step further.

The next day, I cleaned the hearts away from the paper pack—dad ages of gizzards inside the turkeys. Then I wrapped them hearts with a clean hankie and brung them both to get blessed up at the mission. I wanted to get official blessings from the priest, but when Father answered the door to the rectory, wiping his hands on a little towel, I could tell he was a busy man.

“Booshoo, Father,” I said. “I got a slight request to make of you this afternoon. ” “What is it?” he said.

“Would you bless this package?” I held out the hankie with the hearts tied inside it.

He looked at the package, questioning it.

“It’s turkey hearts,” I honestly had to reply.

A look of annoyance crossed his face.

“Why don’t you bring this matter over to Sister Martin,” he said. “I have duties.”

And so, although the blessing wouldn’t be as powerful, I went over to the Sisters with the package.

I rung the bell, and they brought Sister Martin to the door. I had her as a music teacher, but I was always so shy then. I never talked out loud. Now, I had grown taller than Sister Martin.

Looking down, I saw that she was not feeling up to snuff. Brown circles hung under her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” she said, not noticing who I was.

“Remember me, Sister?”

She squinted up at me.

“Oh yes,” she said after a moment. “I’m sorry, you’re the youngest of the Kashpaws. Gordie’s brother.”

Her face warmed up.

“Lipsha,” I said, “that’s my name.”

“Well, Lipsha,” she said, smiling broad at me now, “what can I do for you?”

They always said she was the kindest-hearted of the Sisters up the hill, and she was. She brought me back into their own kitchen and made me take a big yellow wedge of cake and a glass of milk.

“Now tell me,” she said, nodding at my package. “What have you got wrapped up so carefully in those handkerchiefs?”

Like before, I answered honestly.

“Ah, ” said Sister Martin. “Turkey hearts.” She waited.

“I hoped you could bless them.”

She waited some more, smiling with her eyes. Kindhearted though she was, I began to sweat. A person could not pull the wool down over Sister Martin. I stumbled through my mind for an explanation, quick, that wouldn’t scare her off.

“They’re a present,” I said, “for Saint Kateri’s statue.”

“She’s not a saint yet.”

“I know,” I stuttered on, “in the hopes they will crown her.”

“Lipsha,” she said,

“I never heard of such a thing.”

So I told her. “Well the truth is,” I said, “it’s a kind of medicine. ” “For what?”

“Love. ” “Oh Lipsha,” she said after a moment, “you don’t need any medicine. I’m sure any girl would like you exactly the way you are.

I just sat there. I felt miserable, caught in my pack of lies.

“Tell you what,” she said, seeing how bad I felt, “my blessing’ll make any difference anyway. But there is something you won I can do.”

I looked up at her, hopeless.

“Just be yourself ” I looked down at my plate. I knew I wasn’t much to brag about right then, and I shortly became even less. For as I walked out the door I stuck my fingers in the cup of holy water that was sacred from their touches. I put my fingers in and blessed the hearts, quick, with my own hand.

I went back to Grandma and sat down in her little kitchen at the Senior Citizens. I unwrapped them hearts on the table, and her hard agate eyes went soft. She said she wasn’t even going to cook those hearts up but eat them raw so their power would go down strong as possible.

I couldn’t hardly watch when she munch cd hers. Now that’s true love.

I was worried about how she would get Grandpa to eat his, but she told me she’d think of something and don’t worry. So I did not. I was supposed to hide off in her bedroom while she put dinner on a plate for Grandpa and fixed up the heart so he’d eat it. I caught a glint of the plate she was making for him. She put that heart smack on a piece of lettuce like in a restaurant and then attached to it a little heap of boiled peas.

He sat down. I was listening in the next room.

She said,

“Why don’t you have some mash potato?” So he had some mash potato. Then she gave him a little piece of boiled meat. He ate that.

Then she said,

“Why you didn’t never touch your salad yet. See that heart? I’m feeding you it because the doctor said your blood needs building up.”

I couldn’t help it, at that point I peeked through a crack in the door.

I saw Grandpa picking at that heart on his plate with a certain look.

He didn’t look appetized at all, is what I’m saying. I doubted our plan was going to work. Grandma was getting worried, too. She told him one more time, loudly, that he had to eat that heart.

“Swallow it down,” she said. “You’ll hardly notice it.”

He just looked at her straight on. The way he looked at her made me think I was going to see the smokescreen drop a second time, and sure enough it happened.

“What you want me to eat this for so bad?” he asked her uncannily.

Now Grandma knew the jig was up. She knew that he knew—dad she was working medicine. He put his fork down. He rolled the heart around his saucer plate.

“I don’t want to eat this,” he said to Grandma. “It don’t look good.

” “Why it’s fresh grade-A,” she told him. “One hundred percent. ” He didn’t ask percent what, but his eyes took on an even more warier look.

“Just go on and try it, ” she said, taking the salt shaker up in her hand. She was getting annoyed. “Not tasty enough? You want me to salt it for you?” She waved the shaker over his plate.

“All right, skinny white girl!” She had got Grandpa mad.

Oopsy-daisy, he popped the heart into his mouth. I was about to yawn loudly and come out of the bedroom. I was about ready for this crash of wills to be over, when I saw He was still up to his old tricks.

First he rolled it into one side of his cheek. “Mirmunrn, he said.

Then he rolled it into the other side of his cheek.

“Mmmmmirim,” again. Then he stuck his tongue out with the heart on it and put it back, and there was no time to react. He had pulled Grandma’s leg once too far. Her goat was got. She was so mad she hopped up quick as a wink and slugged him between the shoulderblades to make him swallow.

Only thing is, he choked.

He choked real bad. A person can choke to death. You ever sit down at a restaurant table and up above you there is a list of instructions what to do if something slides down the wrong pipe?

It sure makes you chew slow, that’s for damn sure. When Grandpa fell off his chair better believe me that little graphic illustrated poster fled into my mind. I jumped out the bedroom. I done everything within my power that I could do to un lodge what was choking him. I squeezed underneath his ribcage. I socked him in the back. I was desperate.

But here’s the factor of decision: he wasn’t choking on the heart alone.

There was more to it than that. It was other things that choked him as well. It didn’t seem like he wanted to struggle or fight. Death came and tapped his chest, so he went just like that. I’m sorry all through my body at what I done to him with that heart, and there’s those who will say Lipsha Morrissey is just excusing himself off the hook by giving song and dance about how Grandpa gave up.

Maybe I can’t admit what I did. My touch had gone worthless, that is true. But here is what I seen while he lay in my arms.

You hear a person’s life will flash before their eyes when they’re in danger. It was him in danger, not me, but it was his life come over me.