Love Medicine (3 page)

She was a dirty blond, with little patches of hair that were bleached and torn. “Yes I heard,” she hissed through the safety pins in her teeth. “You tell him.”

jerking the baby up, ankles pinned in the forks of her fingers, she repositioned the triangle of cloth under his bottom.

“Grandma told you to tell him. ” King leaned farther in. He had his mother’s long slim legs, and I remembered all at once, seeing him bend all the way into the car, June bending that way too. Me behind her.

She had pushed a rowboat off the gravel beach of some lake we’d all gone to visit together. I had jumped into the rowboat with her. She had one son at the time and didn’t think that she would ever have another child.

So she spoiled me and told me everything, believing I did not understand. She told me things you’d only tell another woman, full grown, and I had adored her wildly for these adult confidences, for her wreaths of blue smoke, for the figure she cut. I had adored her into telling me everything she needed to tell, and it was true, I hadn’t understood the words at the time. But she hadn’t counted on my memory.

Those words stayed with me.

And even now, King was saying something to Lynette that had such an odd dreaming ring to it I almost heard it spoken out in June’s voice.

June had said,

“He used the flat of his hand. He hit me good.”

And now I heard her son say, flat of my hand … but good …”

Lynette rolled out the door, shedding cloth and pins, packing the bare-bottomed child on her hip, and I couldn’t tell what had happened.

Grandpa hadn’t noticed, whatever it was. He turned to the open door and stared at his house.

“This reminds me of something,” he said.

“Well, it should. It’s your house!” Mama barreled out the door, grabbed both of his hands, and pulled him out of the little backseat.

“You have your granddaughter here, Daddy!” Zelda shrieked carefully into Grandpa’s face. “Zelda’s daughter. She came all the way up here to visit from school.”

“Zelda … born September fourteenth, nineteen forty one …

“No, Daddy. This here is my daughter, Albertine. Your granddaughter. ” I took his hand.

Dates, numbers, figures stuck with Grandpa since he strayed, and not the tiring collection of his spawn, proliferating beyond those numbers into nowhere. He took my hand and went along, trusting me whoever I was.

Whenever he came out to the home place now, Grandpa had to get reacquainted with the yard of stunted oaks, marigold beds, the rusted car that had been his children’s playhouse and mine, the few hills of potatoes and stalks of rhubarb that Aurelia still grew. She worked nights, managing a bar called the So Long, and couldn’t keep the place as nicely as Grandpa always had.

Walking him slowly across the lawn, I sidestepped prickers. The hollyhocks were choked with pigweed, and the stones that lined the driveway, always painted white or blue, were flaking back to gray. So was the flat boulder under the clothesline-once my favorite cool place to sit doing nothing while the clothes dried, hiding me.

This land had been allotted to Grandpa’s mother, old Rushes Bear, who had married the original Kashpaw. When allotments were handed out all of her eighteen children except the youngest-twins, Nector and Eli-had been old enough to register for their own. But because there was no room for them in the North Dakota wheat lands most were deeded less-desirable parcels far off, in Montana, and had to move there or sell. The older children left, but the twin brothers still lived on opposite ends of Rushes Bear’s land.

She had let the government put Nector in school, but hidden Eli, the one she couldn’t part with, in the root cellar dug beneath herflOOL In that way she gained a son on either side of the line.

Nector came home from boarding school knowing white reading and writing, while Eli knew the woods. Now, these many years later, hard to tell why or how, my Great-uncle Eli was still sharp, while Grandpa’s mind had left us, gone wary and wild. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

I wanted him to tell me about things that happened before my time, things I’d been too young to understand. The politics for instance.

What had gone on? He’d been an astute political dealer, people said, horse-trading with the government for bits and shreds. Somehow he’d gotten a school built, a factory too, and he’d kept the land from losing its special Indian status under that policy called termination. I wanted to know it all. I kept asking questions as we walked along, as if he’d take the hook by miracle and blurt the memory out right there.

“Remember how you testified . ? What was it like … the old schools … Washington …

Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished.

The same color as water. Grandpa shook his head, remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time. Or at least it seemed that way to me.

Grandma and, the others were always hushing up the wild things he said or talking loudly over them.

Maybe they were bored with his craziness, and then again maybe his mind blurted secrets from the past. If the last was true, sometimes I thought I understood.

Perhaps his loss of memory was a protection from the past, absolving him of whatever had happened. He had lived hard in his time. But he smiled into the air and lived calmly now, with’ It or desolation. When he thought of June, for instance, she was a young girl who fed him black plums. That was the way she would always be for him. His great-grandson, King junior, was happy because he hadn’t yet acquired a memory, while perhaps Grandpa’s happiness was in losing his.

We walked back down the driveway, along the flaking rocks. “He likes that busted lawn chair,” Grandma hollered now, leaning out the door.

“Set him there awhile.”

“Want me to get you a plate from the kitchen?” I asked Grandpa.

“Some bread and butter?”

But he was looking at the collapsed heap anxiously and did not answer.

I pulled the frayed, woven plastic and aluminum into the shape of a chair, he settled into it, and I left him counting something under his breath. Clouds. Trees. All the blades of grass.

I went inside. Grandma was unlocking her expensive canned ham. She patted it before putting it in the oven and closed the door carefully.

“She’s not used to buying this much meat, “Zelda said. “Remember we used to trade for it?”

“Or slaughter our own.” Aurelia blew a round gray cloud of Winston smoke across the table.

“Pew,” said Zelda. “Put the top on the butter.” She flapped her hand in front of her nose. “You know, Mama, I bet this makes you wish it was like it used to be. All us kids in the kitchen again. ” “Oh, I never had no trouble with kids,” Grandma wiped each finger on a dishrag. “Except for once in a while.”

“Except for when?” asked Aurelia.

“Well now …” Grandma lowered herself onto a long-legged stool, waving Zelda’s more substantial chair away. Grandma liked to balance on that stool like an oracle on her tripod. “There was that time someone tried to hang their little cousin,” she declared, and then stopped short.

The two aunts gave her quick, unbelieving looks. Then they were both uneasily silent, neither of them willing to take up the slack and tell the story I knew was about June. I’d heard Aurelia and my mother laughing and accusing each other of the hanging in times past, when it had been only a family story and not the private trigger of special guilts. They looked at me, wondering if I knew about the hanging, but neither would open her lips to ask.

So I said I’d heard June herself tell it.

“That’s right,” Aurelia jumped in. “June told it herself. If she minded being hung, well she never let on!”

“If she minded! You were playing cowboys.

“Ha,” Zelda said You and Gordie had her up on a box, the rope looped over a branch, tied on her neck, very accurate. If she minded! I had to rescue her myself!”

“Oh, I know,” Aurelia admitted. “But we saw it in the movies.

Kids imitate them, you know. We got notorious after that, me and Gordie. Remember Zelda? How you came screaming in the house for Mama?”

“Mama! Mama!” Grandma yodeled an imitation of her daughter.

“They’re hanging June!”

“You came running out there, Mama!” Zelda was swept into the story.

“I didn’t know you could run so fast.”

“We had that rope around her neck and looped over the tree, and poor June was shaking, she was so scared. But we never would have done it.”

“Yes!” asserted Zelda. “You meant to!”

“Oh, I licked you two good,” Grandma remembered. “Aurelia, you and Gordie both.”

“And then you took little June in the house. Zelda broke down suddenly.

Aurelia put her hands to her face. Then, behind her fingers, she made a harsh sound in her throat. “Oh Mama, we could have killed her.

Zelda crushed her mouth behind a fist.

“But then she came in the house. You wiped her face off,” Aurelia remembered. “That June. She yelled at me. “I wasn’t scared! You damn chicken!” And then Aurelia started giggling behind her hands.

Zelda put her fist down on the table with surprising force.

“Damn chicken!” said Zelda.

“You had to lick her too.” Aurelia laughed, wiping her eyes.

“For saying hell and damn Grandma nearly lost her—god” balance.

“Then she got madder yet …… I said.

“That’s right!” Now Grandma’s chin was pulled up to hold her laughter back. “She called me a damn old chicken. Right there!

A damn old hen!”

Then they were laughing out loud in brays and whoops, sopping tears in their aprons and sleeves, waving their hands helplessly.

Outside, King’s engine revved grandly, and a trickle of music started up.

“He’s got a tape deck in that car,” Mama said, patting her heart, her hair, composing herself quickly. “I suppose that cos ted extra money.

The sisters sniffed, fished Kleenex from their sleeves, glanced pensively at one another, and put the story to rest.

“King wants to go off after they eat and find Gordie,” Zelda thought out loud. “He at Eli’s place? It’s way out in the bush.”

“They expect to get Uncle Ell to ride in that new car,” said Grandma in strictly measured, knowing tones.

“Eli won’t ride in it.” Aurelia lighted a cigarette. Her head shook back and forth in scarves of smoke. And for once Zelda’s head shook, too, in agreement, and then Grandma’s as well. She rose, pushing her soft wide arms down on the table.

“Why not?” I had to know. “Why won’t Eli ride in that car?”

“Albertine don’t know about that insurance.” Aurelia pointed at me with her chin. So Zelda turned to me and spoke in her low, prim, explaining voice.

“It was natural causes, see. They had a ruling which decided that.

So June’s insurance came through, and all of that money went to King because he’s oldest, legal. He took some insurance and first bought her a big pink gravestone that they put up on the hill.” She paused.

“Mama, we going up there to visit? I didn’t see that gravestone yet.”

Grandma was at the stove, bending laboriously to check the roast ham, and she ignored us.

“Just recently he bought this new car,” Zelda went on, “with the rest of that money. It has a tape deck and all the furnishings.

Eli doesn’t like it, or so I heard. That car reminds him of his girl.

You know Eli raised June like his own daughter when her mother passed away and nobody else would take her.”

“King got that damn old money,” Grandma said loud and sudden, “not because he was oldest. June named him for the money because he took after her the most.”

So the insurance explained the car. More than that it explained why everyone treated the car with special care. Because it was new, I had thought. Still, I had noticed all along that nobody seemed proud of it except for King and Lynette. Nobody leaned against the shiny blue fenders, ‘rested elbows on the hood, or set paper plates there while they ate. Aurelia didn’t even want to hear King’s tapes. It was as if the car was wired up to something. As if it might give off a shock when touched. Later, when Gordie came, he brushed the glazed chrome and gently tapped the tires with his toes. He would not go riding in it, either, even though King urged his father to experience how smooth it ran.

We heard the car move off, wheels crackling in the gravel and cinders.

Then it was quiet for a long time again.

Grandma was dozing in the next room, and I had taken the last pie from the oven. Aurelia’s new green Sears dryer was still huffing away in the tacked-on addition that held toilet, laundry, kitchen sink. The plumbing, only two years old, was hooked up to one side of the house.

The top of the washer and dryer were covered with clean towels, and all the pies had been set there to cool.

“Well, where are they?” wondered Zelda now. “Joyriding?”

“That white girl,” Mama went on, “she’s built like a truck driver.

She won’t keep King long. Lucky you’re slim, Albertine.

“Jeez, Zelda!” Aurelia came in from the next room. “Why can’t you ‘just leave it be? So she’s white. What about the Swede?

can I How do you think Albertine feels hearing you talk like this when her Dad was white?”

“I feel fine,” I said. “I never knew him.”

I understood what Aurefia meant thought was light, clearly a breed.

“My girl’s an Indian,” Zelda emphasized. “I raised her an Indian, and that’s what she is.”

“Never said no different. ” Aurelia grinned, not the least put out, hitting me with her elbow. “She’s lots better looking than most Kashpaws.

By the time King and Lynette finally came home it was near dusk and we had already moved Grandpa into the house and laid his supper out.

Lynette sat down next to Grandpa, with King Junior in her lap.

She began to feed her son ground liver from a little jar. The baby tried to slap his hands together on the spoon each time it was lowered to his mouth. Every time he managed to grasp the jerked out of his hands and came down with more liver.