Love Medicine (2 page)

Grandma wouldn’t let them in the house for a year, she was so angry. As it turned out, it was an off and-on marriage anyway. Being so much alike they both liked to have their fun. Then, too, June had no patience with children.

She wasn’t much as a mother; everyone in the family said so, even Eli who was crazy about his little girl.

Whatever she lacked as a mother, June was a good aunt to have-the kind that spoiled you. She always kept an extra stick of Doublemint in her coat pocket. Her neck smelled fresh and sweet. She talked to me the way she talked to grownup people and never told me to play outside when I wanted to sit at the edge of a conversation. She had been pretty.

“Miss Indian America,” Grandpa called her. She had stayed pretty even when things got so bad with Gordie that she ran off alone, “like a no-good Morrissey,” people said, leaving her son King. She always planned that she would make it somewhere else first, then send for the boy.

But everything she tried fell through.

When she was studying to be a beautician, I remember, word came that she had purposely burned an unruly customer’s hair stiff green with chemicals. Other secretaries did not like her. She reported drunk for work in dime stores and swaggered out of restaurants where she’d waitressed a week, at the first wisecrack.

Sometimes she came back to Gordie and they made the marriage work for a while longer. Then she would leave again. As time went by she broke, little by little, into someone whose shoulders sagged when she thought no one was looking, a woman with long ragged nails and hair always growing from its beauty-parlor cut.

Her clothes were full of safety pins and hidden tears. I thought now that her one last try had been Williston, a town full of rich, single cowboy-rigger oil trash.

One type I know is boom trash, the ones that bat around the boom.,.-, state in big pickups that are loaded with options. I know, because I worked with them, that to these types an Indian woman’s nothing but an easy night. I saw it laid out clear, as I sat there at my table, how down to the limit that kind of life would have gotten June. But what did I know, in fact, about the thing that happened?

I saw her laughing, so sharp and determined, her purse clutched tight at the bar, her perfect legs crossed.

“Probably drank too much,” Mama wrote. She naturally hadn’t thought well of June. “Probably wandered off too intoxicated to realize about the storm.”

But June grew up on the plains. Even drunk she’d have known a storm was coming. She’d have known by the heaviness in the air, the smell in the clouds. She’d have gotten that animal sinking in her bones.

I sat there at my table, thinking about June. From time to time, overhead, I heard my landlady’s vacuum cleaner. Through my window there wasn’t much to see-dirt and dead snow and wheels rolling by in the street. It was warm but the grass was brown, except in lush patches over the underground steam pipes on the campus. I did something that day. I put on my coat and went walking down the street until I came to a big stretch of university lawn that was crossed by a steam-pipe line of grass-so bright your eyes ached-and even some dandelions. I walked out there and lay down on that patch of grass, above the ground, and I thought of Aunt June until I felt the right way for her.

I was so mad at my mother, Zelda, that I didn’t write or call for almost two months. She should have gone up the nun’s hill to the convent, like she wanted, instead of having me. But she had married Swede Johnson from off-reservation, and I’d arrived premature. He’d had the grace, at least, to go A.W.O.L. from army boot camp and never let his face be seen again. All I knew of him L_ —deg was pictures, blond, Weak, and doomed to wander, perhaps as much by Mania’s rage at her downfall as by the uniform. I’d been the one who’d really blocked my mother’s plans for being pure.

I’d forced her to work for money, keeping books, instead of pursuing tasks that would bring divine glory on her head. I’d caused her to live in a trailer near Grandma so that there would be someone to care for me.

Later on, I’d provided her with years of grinding grief. I had gone through a long phase of wickedness and run away. Yet now that I was on the straight and narrow, things were even worse between us.

After two months were gone and my classes were done, and although I still had not forgiven my mother, I decided to go home. I wasn’t crazy about the thought of seeing her, but our relationship was like a file we sharpened on, and necessary in that way. So I threw a few books and some clothes in the backseat of my Mustang. It was the first car I’d ever owned, a dull black hard driven car with rusted wheel wells, a stick shift, and a windshield wiper only on the passenger side.

All along the highway that early summer the land was beautiful. The sky stretched bare. Tattered silver windbreaks bounded flat, plowed fields that the government had paid to lie fallow.

Everything else was dull tan-the dry ditches, the dying crops, the buildings of farms and towns. Rain would come just in time that year.

Driving north, I could see the earth lifting. The wind was hot and smelled of tar and the moving dust.

At the end of the big farms and the blowing fields was the reservation.

I always knew it was coming a long way off. Even in the distance you sense hills from t heir opposites-pits, dried sloughs, ditches of cattails, potholes. And then the water. There would be water in the hills when there wasn’t any on the plains, because the hollows saved it, collected runoff from the low slopes, and the dense trees held it, too.

I thought of water in the roots of trees, brown and bark smelling, cold.

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The highway narrowed off and tangled, then turned to gravel with ruts, holes, and tall blue alfalfa bunching in the ditches.

Small hills reared up. Dogs leaped from nowhere and ran themselves out fiercely. The dust hung thick.

My mother lives ‘just on the very edge of the reservation with her new husband, B’ornson, who owns a solid wheat farm. She’s lived there about a year. I grew up with her in an aqua-and-silver trailer, set next to the old house on the land my great-grandparents were allotted when the government decided to turn Indians into farmers.

The policy of allotment was a joke. As I was driving toward the land, looking around, I saw as usual how much of the reservation was sold to whites and lost forever. just three miles, and I was driving down the rutted dirt road, home.

The main house, where all of my aunts and uncles grew up, is one big square room with a cooking shack tacked onto it. The house is a light peeling lavender now, the color of a pale petunia, but it was never painted while I lived there. My mother had it painted for Grandma as an anniversary present one year. Soon after the paint job the two old ones moved into town where things were livelier and they didn’t have to drive so far to church. Luckily, as it happened, the color suited my Aunt Aurelia, because she moved into the house and has taken care of it since.

Driving up to the house I saw that her brown car and my mother’s creamy yellow one were parked in the yard. I got out.

They were indoors, baking. I heard their voices from the steps and smelled the rich and browning pie crusts But when I walked into the dim, warm kitchen they hardly acknowledged me, they were so involved in their talk.

“She sure was good-looking,” Aurelia argued, hands buried in a dishpan of potato salad.

“Some people use spoons to mix.” My mother held out a heavy tin one from the drawer and screwed her lips up like a coin

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purse to kiss me. She lit hey eyes and widened them. “I was only saying she had seen a few hard times, and there was bruises… .”

“Wasn’t either. You never saw her. ” Aurelia was plump, a “looker.”

She waved my mother’s spoon off with a caked hand.

“In fact, did anybody see her? Nobody saw her. Nobody knows for sure what happened, so who’s to squawk about bruises and so on … nobody saw her.”

“Well I heard,” said Mama,

“I heard she was with a man and he dumped her off.”

I sat down, dipped a slice of apple in the bowl of sugar cinnamon topping, and ate it. They were talking about June.

“Heard nothing,” Aurelia snapped. “Don’t trust nothing you don’t see with your own eyes. June was all packed up and ready to come home.

They found her bags when they busted in her room.

She walked out there because”-Aurelia foundered, then her voice strengthened-“what did she have to come home to after all? Nothing!”

“Nothing?” said Mama piercingly. “Nothing to come home to?” She gave me a short glance full of meaning. I had, after all, come home, even if husband less childless, driving a fall-apart car. I looked away from her. She puffed her cheeks out in concentration, patting and crimping the edges of the pies. They were beautiful pies-rhubarb, wild Juneberry, apple, and gooseberry, all fruits preserved by Grandma Kashpaw or my mother or Aurelia.

“I suppose you washed your hands before you put t hem in that salad,”

she said to Aurelia.

Aurelia squeezed her face into crescents of patient exasperation.

“Now Zelda,” she said, “your girl’s going to think you still treat me like your baby sister.”

“Well you are aren’t you? Can’t change that.”

“I’m back,” I said.

They looked at me as if I had, at that very moment, walked in the door.

“Albertine’ s home,” observed Aurelia. “My hands are full or I’d hug you.”

“Here,” said Mama, setting down a jar of pickles near me.

“Aren’t you dressed nice. Did you get your top in Fargo? Was the drive good?”

I said yes.

“Dice these pickles up.” She handed me a bowl and knife.

“June went after Gordie like he didn’t have no choice,” my mother decided now. “She could at least have kept him happy once she got him in her clutch! It’s just clear how Gordie loved her, only now he takes it out in liquor. He’s always over at Eli’s house trying to get Ell to join him for a toot. You know, after the way June treated him, I don’t know why Gordie didn’t ‘just let her go to ruin.”

“Well, she couldn’t get much more ruined than dead,” Aurelia said.

The odd thing about the two-Mama with her careful permanent and rough gray face, Aurelia with her flat blue-black ponytail, high rounded cheeks, tight jeans, and frilled rodeo shirts-was the differ enter they acted the more alike they showed themselves. They clung to their rock-bottom opinions. They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

Mama gave up discussing June after Aurelia’s observation and began on me.

“Have you met any marriageable boys in Fargo yet?” Her flat gray thumbs pursued each other around and around in circles, leaving perfect squeezed scallops. By marriageable I knew she meant Catholic. I shook my head no.

“At this rate I’ll be too old and stiff to take care of my own grandchildren,” Mama said. Then she smiled and shrugged her shoulders lightly. “My girl’s choosy like me,” she said. “Can’t be too choosy.”

.… . . ……… Aurelia snorted, but contained her remark, which probably would have referred to Mama’s first husband.

“Albertine’s got time,” Aurelia answered for me. “What’s her rush?

Believe me”-she addressed me now with mock serious vigor-“marriage is not the answer to it all. I tried it enough myself ” “I’m not interested anyway,” I let them know. “I’ve got other things to do.”

“Oh my,” said Mama, “are you going to be a career girl?”

She froze with her hands in the air, seemingly paralyzed by the idea.

“You were a career girl,” I accused her. I handed her the pickles, all diced into little cubes. Mama had kept books for the priests and nuns up at Sacred Heart since I could remember. She ignored me, however, and began to poke wheels of fork marks in the tops of the pies. Aurelia mixed. I watched my mother’s hands precisely stabbing.

After a while we heard the car from the main road as it slowed for the turn. It would be June’s son, King, his wife, Lynette, and King junior.

They drove up to the front steps in their brand-new sports car.

King junior was bundled in the front seat and both Grandma and Grandpa Kashpaw were stuffed, incredibly, into the tiny backseat.

“There’s that white girl.” Mama peeked out the window.

“Oh, for gosh sakes.” Aurelia gave her heady snort again, and this time did not hold her tongue. “What about your Swedish boy?”

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“Learnt my lesson,” Mama wiped firmly around the edges of L Aurelia’s dishpan. “Never marry a Swedish is my rule.”

L, F Grandma Kashpaw’s rolled-down nylons and brown support shoes appeared first, then her head in its iron-gray pageboy. Last of all the entire rest of her squeezed through the door, swathed in acres of tiny black sprigged flowers. When I was very young, she always seemed the same size to me as the rock cairns comm em I 0 orating Indian defeats around here. But every time I saw her now I realized that she wasn’t so large, it was just that her figure was weathered and massive as a statue roughed out in rock. She never changed much, at least not so much as Grandpa. Since I’d left home, gone to school, he’d turned into an old man. Age had come upon him suddenly, like a storm in fall, shaking yellow leaves down overnight, and now his winter, deep and quiet, was on him. As Grandma shook out her dress and pulled bundles through the back window, Grandpa sat quietly in the car. He hadn’t noticed that it had stopped. “Why don’t you tell him it stopped,” Grandma called to Lynette, Lynette was changing King junior’s diaper in the front seat.

She generally used paper diapers with stick-‘em tabs at her home in the Cities, but since she’d been here my mother had shamed her into using washable cloth diapers and sharp pins. The baby wiggled and fought her hands.

“You hear?” King, already out of the car and nervously examining his tires, stuck his head back in the driver’s side window and barked at Lynette. “She was calling you. My father’s mother. She just told you to do something.”

Lynette’s face, stained and swollen, bloomed over the wheel.