Love Medicine Part 4

Lipsha went on talking.

"Energy," he said, "electromagnetic waves. It's because of the temperature, the difference sets them off. " He was talking about the northern lights. Although he never did well in school, Lipsha knew surprising things. He read books about computers and volcanoes and the life cycles of salamanders. Sometimes he used words I had to ask him the meaning of, and other times he didn't make even the simplest sense.

I loved him for being both ways. A wash of love swept me over the sickness. I sat up.

"I am going to talk to you about something particular a aI began. My voice was serious, all of a sudden, and it scared him.

He moved away from me, suspicious. I was going to tell him what I'd heard from hanging at the edge of the aunts' conversations. I was going to tell him that his mother was June. Since so many others knew, it was only right that he should, too.

"Your mother . I began.

"I can never forgive what she done to a little child," he said.

"They had to rescue me out of her grip.

I tried again.

"I want to talk about your mother a.. Lipsha nodded, cutting me off. "I consider Grandma Kashpaw my mother, even though she just took me In I ike any old stray."

"She didn't do that," I said. "She wanted you."

"No," said Lipsha. "Albertine, you don't know what you're talking about."

Now I was the one who felt ignorant, confused.

"As for my mother," be went on, "even if she came back right now, this minute, and got down on her knees and said "Son, I am sorry for what I done to you," I would not relent on her.

I didn't know how to rescue my intentions and go on. I thought for a while, or tried to, but sitting up and talking had been too much.

"What if your mother never meant to?" I lay down again, lowering myself carefully into the wheat. The dew was condensing. I was cold, damp, and sick. "What if it was just a kind of mistake?" I asked.

"It wasn't no mistake," said Lipsha firmly. "She would have drowned me."

Laying still, confused by my sickness and his certainty, I almost believed him. I thought he would hate June if he knew, and anyway it was too late. I justified my silence. I didn't tell him.

"What about your father?" I asked instead. "Do you wish you knew him?"

Lipsha was quiet, considering, before he answered.

"I wouldn't mind."

Then I was falling, and he was talking again. I hung on and listened.

"Did you ever dream you flew through the air?" he asked. "Did you ever dream you landed on a planet or star?

"I dreamed I flew up there once," he said, going on. "It was all lighted up. Man, it was beautiful! I landed on the moon, but once I stood there at last, I didn't dare take a breath."

I moved closer. He had a light nylon jacket. He took it off and laid it over me. I was suddenly comfortable" very comfortable, and warm.

"No," he said. "No, I was scared to breathe."

I woke up. I had fallen asleep in the arms of Lipsha's jacket, in the cold wet wheat under the flashing sky. I heard the clanging sound of struck metal, pots tumbling in the house. Gordie was gone. Eli was gone. "Come on," I said, jumping straight up at the noise. "They're fighting." I ran up the hill, Lipsha pounding behind me. I stumbled straight into the lighted kitchen and saw at once that King was trying to drown Lynette. He was pushing her face in the sink of cold dishwater. Holding her by the nape and the ears.

Her arms were whirling, knocking spoons and knives and bowls out of the drainer. She struggled powerJ fully, but he had her. I grabbed a block of birch out of the woodbox and hit King on the back of the neck. The wood bounced out of my fists. He pushed her lower, and her throat caught and gurgled.

I grabbed his shoulders. I expected that Lipsha was behind me.

King hardly noticed my weight. He pushed her lower. So I had no choice then. I jumped on his back and bit his ear. My teeth met and blood filled my mouth. He reeled backward, bucking me off, and I flew across the room, hit the refrigerator solidly, and got back on my feet.

His hands were c.o.c.ked in boxer's fists. He was deciding who to hit first, I thought, me or Lipsha. I glanced around. I was alone. I stared back at King, scared for the first time. Then the fear left and I was mad, just mad, at Lipsha, at King, at Lynette, at Junea. I looked past King and I saw what they had done.

All the pies were smashed. Torn open. Black juice bleeding through the crusts. Bits of jagged sh.e.l.ls were stuck to the wall and some were turned completely upside down. Chunks of rhubarb were sc.r.a.ped across the floor. Meringue dripped from the towels.

"The pies!" I shrieked. "You G.o.dd.a.m.n sonofab.i.t.c.h, you broke the pies!"

His eyes widened. When he glanced around at the destruction, Lynette scuttled under the table. He took in what he could, and then his fists lowered and a look at least resembling shame, confusion, swept over his face, and he rushed past me. He stepped down flat on his fisherman hat as he ran, and after he was gone I picked it up.

I went into the next room and stuffed the hat under King Junior's mattress. Then I sat for a long time, listening to his light breathing.

He was always a good baby, or more likely a wise soul.

He slept through everything he could possibly sleep through.

Lynette had turned the lights out in the kitchen as she left the house, and now I heard her outside the window begging King to take her away in the car.

"Let's go off before they all get back," she said. "It's them. You always get so crazy when you're home. We'll get the baby. We'll go off. We'll go back to the Cities, go home."

And then she cried out once, but clearly it was a cry like pleasure.

I thought I heard their bodies creak together, or perhaps it was just the wood steps beneath them, the old worn boards bearing their weight.

They got into the car soon after that. Doors slammed. But they traveled just a few yards and then stopped. The horn blared softly.

Isuppose they knocked against it in pa.s.sion. The heater roared on from time to time. It was a cold, spare dawn.

Sometime that hour I got up, leaving the baby, and went into the kitchen. I spooned the fillings back into the crusts, married slabs of dough, smoothed over edges of crusts with a wetted finger, fit crimps to crimps and even fluff to fluff on top of berries or pudding. I worked carefully for over an hour. But once they smash there is no way to put them right.

SAINT MARIE r G a Sr (1934) MARIE LAZAR RE.

So when I went there, I knew the dark fish must rise. Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard. There was no use in trying to ignore me any longer. I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I was going up there to pray as good as they could.

Because I don't have that much Indian blood. And they never thought they'd have a girl from this reservation as a saint they'd have to kneel to. But they'd have me. And I'd be carved in pure gold. With ruby lips. And my toenails would be little pink ocean sh.e.l.ls, which they would have to stoop down off their high horse to kiss.

I was ignorant. I was near age fourteen. The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. And it was just that-the pure and wideness of my ignorance-that got me A up the hill to Sacred Heart Convent and brought me back down alive.

For maybe Jesus did not take my bait, but them Sisters tried to cram me right down whole.

You ever see a walleye strike so bad the lure is practically out its back end before you reel it in? That is what they done with me. I don't like to make that low comparison, but I have seen a walleye do that once. And it's the same attempt as Sister Leopolda made to get me in her clutch.

I had the mail-order Catholic soul you get in a girl raised out in the bush, whose only thought is getting into town. For Sunday Ma.s.s is the only time my father brought his children in except for school, when we were harnessed. Our soul went cheap. We were so anxious to get there we would have walked in on our hands and knees. We just craved going to the store, slinging bottle caps in the dust, making fool eyes at each other. And of course we went to church.

Where they have the convent is on top of the highest hill, so that from its windows the Sisters can be looking into the marrow of the town.

Recently a windbreak was planted before the bar "for the purposes of tornado insurance." Don't tell me that. That poplar stand was put up to hide the drinkers as they get the transformation. As they are served into the beast of their burden.

While they're drinking, that body comes upon them, and then they stagger or crawl out the bar door, pulling a weight they can't move past the poplars. They don't want no holy witness to their fall.

Anyway, I climbed. That was a long-ago day. There was a road then for wagons that wound in ruts to the top of the hill where they had their buildings of painted brick. Gleaming white. So white the sun glanced off in dazzling display to set forms whirling behind your eyelids. The face of G.o.d you could hardly look at.

But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side. The cracked whitewash and swallows nesting in IL list the busted ends of eaves. I saw the boards sawed the size of broken windowpanes and the fruit trees, stripped. Only the tough wild rhubarb flourished. Goldenrod rubbed up their walls. It was a poor convent. I didn't see that then but I know that now. Compared to others it was humble, ragtag, out in the middle of no place. It was the end of the world to some. Where the maps stopped. Where G.o.d had only half a hand in the creation.

Mere the Dark One had put in thick bush, liquor, wild dogs, and Indians.

I heard later that the Sacred Heart Convent was a catchall place for nuns that don't get along elsewhere. Nuns that complain too much or lose their mind. I'll always wonder now, after hearing that, where they picked up Sister Leopolda. Perhaps she had scarred someone else, the way she left a mark on me. Perhaps she was just sent around to test her Sisters' faith, here and there, like the spot-checker in a factory. For she was the definite most-hard trial to anyone's endurance, even when they started out with veils of wretched love upon their eyes.

I was that girl who thought the black hem of her garment would help me rise. Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing-that was me. I was like those bush Indians who stole the holy black hat of a Jesuit and swallowed little sc.r.a.ps of it to cure their fevers. But the hat itself carried smallpox and was killing them with belief.

Veils of faith! I had this confidence in Leopolda. She was different.

The other Sisters had long ago gone blank and given up on Satan. He slept for them. They never noticed his comings and goings. But Leopolda kept track of him and knew his habits, minds he burrowed in, deep s.p.a.ces where he hid. She knew as much about him as my grandma, who called him by other names and was not afraid.

In her cla.s.s, Sister Leopolda carried a long oak pole for opening high windows. It had a hook made of iron on one end that could jerk a patch of your hair out or throttle you by the collar him all from a distance.

She used this deadly hook-pole for catching Satan by surprise. He could have entered without your knowing it-through your lips or your nose or any one of your seven openings-and gained your mind. But she would see him. That pole would brain you from behind.

And he would gasp, dazzled, and take the first thing she offered, which was pain.

She had a stringer of children who could only breathe if she said the word. I was the worst of them. She always said the Dark One wanted me most of all, and I believed this. I stood out. Evil was a common thing I trusted. Before sleep sometimes he came and whispered conversation in the old language of the bush. I listened. He told me things he never told anyone but Indians. I was privy to both worlds of his knowledge. I listened to him, but I had confidence in Leopolda.

She was the only one of the bunch he even noticed.

There came a day, though, when Leopolda turned the tide with her hook-pole.

It was a quiet day with everyone working at their desks, when I heard him. He had sneaked into the closets in the back of the room. He was scratching around, tasting crumbs in our pockets, stealing b.u.t.tons, squirting his dark juice in the linings and the boots. I was the only one who heard him, and I got bold. I smiled. I glanced back and smiled and looked up at her sly to see if she had noticed. My heart jumped.

For she was looking straight at me. And she sniffed. She had a big stark bony nose stuck to the front of her face for smelling out brimstone and evil thoughts.

She had smelled him on me. She stood up. Tall, pale, a blackness leading into the deeper blackness of the slate wall behind her. Her oak pole had flown into her grip. She had seen me glance at the closet. Oh, she knew. She knew *just where he was.

I watched her watch him in her mind's eye. The whole cla.s.s was watching now. She was staring, sizing, following his scuffle. And all of a sudden she tensed down, posed on her bent knee springs c.o.c.ked her arm back. She threw the oak pole singing over my head, through my brain cloud It cracked through the thin wood door of the back closet, and the heavy pointed hook drove through his heart. I turricd. She'd speared her own black rubber over boot where he'd taken refuge in the tip of her darkest toe.

Something howled in my mind. Loss and darkness. I understood. I was to suffer for my smile.

He rose up hard in my heart. I didn't blink when the pole cracked.

My skull was tough. I didn't flinch when she shrieked in my ear. I only shrugged at the flowers of h.e.l.l. He wanted me.

More than anything he craved me. But then she did the worst.

She did what broke my mind to her. She grabbed me by the collar and dragged me, feet flying, through the room and threw me in the closet with her dead black over boot And I was there.

The only light was a crack beneath the door. I asked the Dark One to enter into me and boost my mind. I asked him to restrain my tears, for they was pushing behind my eyes. But he was afraid to come back there.

He was afraid of her sharp pole. And I was afraid of Leopolda's pole for the first time, too. I felt the cold hook in my heart. How it could crack through the door at any minute and drag me out, like a dead fish on a gaff, drop me on the floor like a gutshot squirrel.

I was nothing. I edged back to the wall as far as I could. I breathed the chalk dust. The hem of her full black cloak cut against my cheek.

He had left me. Her spear could find me any time. Her keen ears would aim the hook into the beat of my heart.

What was that sound?

It filled the closet, filled it up until it spilled over, but I did not recognize the crying wailing voice as mine until the door cracked open, brightness, and she hoisted me to her camphor-smelling lips.

"He wants you," she said. "That's the difference. I give you love.

Idd d MOM Love The black hook. The spear singing through the mind. I saw that she had tracked the Dark One to my heart and flushed him out into the open. So now my heart was an empty nest where she could lurk.

Well, I was weak. I was weak when I let her in, but she got a foothold there. Hard to dislodge as the year pa.s.sed. Sometimes I felt him-the brush of dim wings-but only rarely did his voice compel. It was between Marie and Leopolda now, and the struggle changed. I began to realize I had been on the wrong track with the fruits of lien. The real way to overcome Leopolda was this: I'd get to heaven first. And then, when I saw her coming, I'd shut the gate. She'd be out! That is why, besides the bowing and the sc.r.a.ping I'd be dealt, I wanted to sit on the altar as a saint.

To this end, I went up on the hill. Sister Leopolda was the consecrated nun who had sponsored me to come there.

"You're not vain," she said. "You're too honest, looking into the mirror, for that. You're not smart. You don't have the ambition to get clear. You have two choices. One, you can marry a no-good Indian, bear his brats, die like a dog. Or two, you can give yourself to G.o.d."

"I'll come up there," I said, "but not because of what you think.

I could have had any d.a.m.n man on the reservation at the time.

And I could have made him treat me like his own life. I looked good.

And I looked white. But I wanted Sister Leopolda's heart.

And here was the thing: sometimes I wanted her heart in love and admiration. Sometimes. And sometimes I wanted her heart to roast on a black stick.

She answered the back door where they had instructed me to call.

I stood there with my bundle. She looked me up and down.

"All right," she said finally. "Come in."

She took my hand. Her fingers were like a bundle of broom straws, so thin and dry, but the strength of them was unnatural. I couldn't have tugged loose if she was leading me into rooms of white-hot coal. Her strength was a kind of perverse miracle, for she got it from fasting herself thin. Because of this hunger practice her lips were a wounded brown and her skin deadly pale. Her eye sockets were two deep lash less hollows in a taut skull. I told you about the nose already. It stuck out far and made the place her eyes moved even deeper, as if she stared out the wrong end of a gun barrel. She took the bundle from my hands and threw it in the corner.

"You'll be sleeping behind the stove, child."

It was immense, like a great furnace. There was a small cot close behind it.

"Looks like it could get warm there," I said.

"Hot. It does."