Love Medicine (30 page)

“Lulu, call the dogs off,” he said.

After all the grudge, the pity, I could not help but take him in

“Down boys,” I whispered. “Leave Nector be.”

my arms. I He held me tightly, and we began to kiss. But things being what they were, what with him knocking off my wig and Lipsha Morrissey popping in unexpectedly to ask what was going on, nothing really went too far after that first surprising embrace. As soon as I got free I walked out of there leaving my laundry sitting in the tumblers.

Dreamstuff. It was all I needed at this time.

Once I gave the tribal council hell about their mortal illusions.

And yet here I was making my one big mistake in life over again for the sake of illusion. What I felt for Nector was just elusive dreams but no less powerful for being false. He had no true memory or mind.

I should have known that.

I was down in Grand Forks, surviving my operation, when Nector Kashpaw died. I saw no ghostly green light, heard no voice.

Nothing unusual happened to inform me of his passing. Lyman told me about it the day after, when he came down to take me back to Senior Citizens. In a strange way I took the news calmly, but I was grateful the pads of cotton were taped over my eyes. I was glad not to show all I felt, and yet Lyman must have noticed something.

“He was your boyfriend once, wasn’t he?” Lyman asked after my long silence. His voice was hesitating, almost sad. I pictured Lyman about ten years old. He was chubbier then and kept his dimes in an old Nesbits pop bottle.

“Where did you hear about me and Kashpaw?”

“Around. ” “I was always a hot topic,” I said.

I could feel that he didn’t smile. He was never quite the same after Henry.

“You know what?” he sighed after a while. “I don’t really want to know.”

Of course, he did know that Kashpaw was his father. What he really meant was there was nothing to be done about it anymore.

I felt the loss. I wanted to hold my son in my lap and let him cry.

Even blind, a mother knows when her boy is holding in a painful silence.

But we got packed and never said another word all the way home. The new expensive car, the first one he’d bought since the convertible, was cool and tight inside as a cave. It hadn’t struck me, going down to the hospital, but on the way back I was sad at the thought that we would soon arrive at a place, break our silence, and leave the soft deep bucket seats.

“Let’s go driving around someday,” I said when he let me into my apartment.

But he didn’t answer. He just said he had to go.

Nothing ever hurt me like the day Lyman walked into my trailer with mud in his hair. The worst thing was, every time I think back, that Henry junior died by drowning. I could not get it from my head. Old Man Pillager told me, when we were on the closest terms, how drowning was the worst death for a Chippewa to experience. By all accounts, the drowned weren’t allowed into the next life but forced to wander forever, broken shoed, cold, sore, and ragged. There was no place for the drowned in heaven or anywhere on earth. That is what I never found it easy to forget, and that is also the reason I broke custom very often and spoke Henry junior’s name, out loud, on my tongue.

I wanted him to know, if he heard, that he still had a home.

Nector Kashpaw did not die by drowning, but he wandered for a while.

Blind in my room I mourned Nector, although I knew we had really parted long ago, on the night my dogs tore the meat scraps out of his hands and then started in on him. I heard their brute cries following him over the next hill, out of my life. I screamed so hard inside, laughing at the cartoon picture of him running, that I had to stuff the corner of the pillow between my teeth. But after that night I thought he couldn’t truly hurt me, even with his death.

It surprised me, after all, how much I felt.

There were so many things I never cried for. I knew if I started now I would have to waste all the rest of my last years. Besides that there weren’t tears in me. I was incapable. The operation had my eyes so dried out. I was going to get someone to put the drops in, for Lyman said he couldn’t. I wasn’t ever supposed to stoop down, scream, or jig again because the stitching in my eye might slip.

That is why, after the funeral, when Nector came back from the other side to visit me, I kept still.

It was an odd time to remember doctor’s orders, but I’d never been in quite the situation. Naturally I couldn’t see him, but I woke up the minute he whispered my name. It was how he’d sometimes come to me in the old days, making his way through the window so soundlessly he’d be underneath my covers just as I woke up, and then I’d turn … And he was there like so long ago. I remembered the doctor’s advice to keep still. I felt the long weight of Nector, cold with the chill of early morning, and I smelled the lilac bath soap on his hands.

All through my room the moths had hit their eyes. I felt their soft presences and the breeze of their fanning wings, tufted feelers, and the night passed in his arms, and the darkness did not lift.

New worlds, I thought, beyond this. Things of which I’d never heard.

Yet, when morning had apparently come, life went on even more usual than usual. I had put in my request for an aide at the desk but they didn’t have enough aides for all who needed them.

That’s why Marie volunteered to take care of me. She knocked that morning. I let her in.

Things are new even at the age when we are supposed to have seen everything. We sat down for coffee and listened to the early morning music hour on the radio. I thought her voice was like music in itself, ripe and quiet. I had gotten so good at listening I appreciated just the sound of it. I gave her a pillow I’d made out of those foam rubber petals they sell in kits.

“This is real nice,” she said. “I never learned how to do this kind of thing.”

“You were always too busy taking children in,” I told her.

Then there was something I had to get off my chest.

“I appreciate you coming here to help me get my vision,” I said.

“But the truth is I have no regrets.”

“That’s all right.” She was almost impersonal in her kindness.

Her voice had lightened. “There’s a pattern of three lines in the wood.”

I didn’t understand, so she put it another way.

“Somebody had to put the tears into your eyes.”

We fell to hearing the music again.

She did not mention Nector’s funeral. We did not talk about Nector.

He was already there. Too much might start the flood gates flowing and our moment would be lost. It was enough

“Just to sit there without words. We mourned him the same way together. That was the point. It was enough. For the first time I saw exactly how another woman felt, and it gave me deep comfort, surprising. It gave me the knowledge that whatever had happened the night before, and in the past, would finally be over once my bandages came off.

She got my eye drops from the table. I tipped my head back and felt her gently peel the tape from my cheeks. She wiped my eyes with a warm washcloth. I blinked. The light was cloudy but I could already see.

She swayed down like a dim mountain, huge and blurred, the way a mother must look to her just born child.

CROSSING THE WATER r .J a S (1984) 1.

HOWARD KASHPAW He watched the women in their blue nightgowns with the jars on their heads. They went around and around the bathroom in rows.

Sometimes they disappeared behind the cabinets, the toilet tank, Or tub, but always they came out in single file again. They never stumbled.

They never had to steady their jars. Their calm tread calmed him. Below the cracked tiles they walked in seamless gowns.

Now and then, outside, his father kicked the table.

“He’s busted out again. I’m sunk.”

A note that sounded childish even to the child was in the voice.

Spoons, bowls, ashtrays, and bottles clinked together. That was not so bad. The bad part was his big voice ripping out, then getting childish.

His mother screamed.

“What about us? What about us?”

-mom She said his father could only think about himself. She screamed until the women on the wall trembled. King junior’s nightmare was to see their jars crack or their arms fall off while she screamed.

But this did not happen. The miracle was that they stayed put together, flowing forward, moving around him in a circle.

In school, they called him Howard. It happened like this: The first grade teacher had said to his mother,

“Your boy is very bright, Mrs. Kashpaw. Did you teach him how to read?”

“I don’t know how he learned it,” his mother had said. “Unless from thatfV program.”

King Junior watched everything, but Sesame Street was what taught him.

He read the backs of cereal boxes, labels on cans, the titles in her love magazines. He was ahead of the other children in kindergarten, and so they put him in the first grade.

“King Howard Kashpaw, junior,” said his new teacher.

“Which of those names would you like to be called?”

He had never thought about it.

“Howard,” he was surprised to hear himself answer. It was that simple.

After that he was Howard at school.

They were cutting out red paper hearts one afternoon. Hearts to tack up on the bulletin boards. The teacher had a black Magic Marker. One by one the children went up to his desk and used his Magic Marker to write their name s in the center of their hearts.

The sharp-smelling ink soaked into the paper. PERMANENT, it said on the marker’s label. “That means forever,” said the teacher when Howard asked. “It won’t erase.”

“Good,” said Howard.

He sat down and watched the teacher tape his heart on the wall. The wall was green. Placed against the wall, oddly, the heart seemed to pulse. In and out. He stared at the heart with his name firmly inside of it, and suddenly something moved inside of him. He felt a ‘olt of strangeness. For a moment he was heavy, full of meaning.

Howard was sitting there. Howard was both familiar and different.

Howard was living in this body like a house.

Howard Kashpaw.

At home, the blue women continued to circle. A neighbor had come by and hit the door with a broom handle. Their voices went down after that.

“What should we do? What should we do?”

they said. He thought the police might come to get his father again.

It had happened once before in the middle of a normal day. They had come to the door and snapped the circles on big King’s wrists. Now he heard his father and mother go into the next room, then they were’ quiet. He leaned back against the porcelain tank. He could sleep now; whatever she screamed about was over.

LIPS HA MORRISSEY King Kashpaw was advising me: 14 There’s no way you’re gonna lose the M. P Shit. Turn yourself in! I know them bastards don’t let up on you, man. I was in the Marines. ” “You been a lot of places,” Lynette told her husband roughly.

“Stillwater Pen?”

“Fuck that for now. I was in Nam.”

“He never got off the West Coast.” Lynette leaned back to me with a bleery confiding look. Not that she’d been drinking She seemed punch-addled or half asleep. “We listen to him anyway,” she winked.

“How he does blab on.”

King glared at the little green-and-yellow-checkered mat in the middle of the table, but he didn’t take up the challenge. In the past couple of years his face had pouched up and swelled. He was a wreck of a good-time boy now, with a soft belly in his T-shirt and eyes usually squeezed shut against the harsh light.

“Them bastards ‘just won’t let up on you,” he repeated.

He was drinking cans of 7-Up. There was about a case of empties scattered all around the apartment. I had never seen him drinking pop before.

“Go bite,” Lynette told him. “I wouldn’t let those MPs get a hold of me. ” She shook her head in my direction. She’d frizzed her hair out in a solid-red halo. “What made you sign with the dumb-shit army anyway?” she asked.

“I had a feeling my mother would have wanted me to,” I said.

They got uncomfortable quiet and gave each other a quick glance.

That’s when I knew they both knew the secret of who my mother was.

They had both known all along. There was too many who had known. Too many for me to hate them one by one. So I just smiled, although my stomach was a churning washer full of dimes.

I was King’s half brother, see, a bastard son of June’s.

The old lady who told me this fact was the one who put the spell on Grandpa Kashpaw in his youth. Some said she caused him, later, to lose his senses. It was Lulu Lamartine-the jab wa witch whose foundation garments was a nightmare cage for little birds.

I’d had a lowdown opinion of Lulu, like most, but I’ll respect her from now on because her motives was correct in telling me.

She made an effort. She told me about June in a simple way that let me know that grownup business was meant.

After she told me I tried, I really did try, to take it all in my grain of thought. But here, as you’ll see in the eventual telling, I met with a failure of the heart. In the end that was the overbearing reason I joined up.

So to go on with the story, I was walking in the hall of the Senior Citizens one day when Lulu opened her door and leaned out beckoning. She had red lacquer on her hooks, bangle jewelry all up her arms, and her head was like a closet of crows. A ragring wig.

“Come on in here,” she said. “Young man we got something to talk about.”

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Lamartine.

I was quite careful. To tell the truth I was afraid of her. She scared people after the bandages came off her eyes, because she seemed to know everybody else’s business. No one understood that like I did.

For you see, having what they call the near-divine healing touch, I know that such things are purely possible. If she had some kind of power, I wasn’t one to doubt.

That time the Defender girl was less than two months pregnant Lulu knew about it just from touching her hand.

When Old Man Bunachi got a mistaken thousand-dollar credit from the government in his social security check, she asked him for a tiding-over loan. He had been keeping it a secret.