Love Medicine (8 page)

“How the stigmata … the marks of the nails … appeared in your palm and you swooned at the holy vision …… “Yes,” I said curiously.

And then, after a moment, I understood.

Leopolda had saved herself with her quick brain. She had witnessed a miracle. She had hid the fork and told this to the others.

And of course they believed her, because they never knew how Satan came and went or where he took refuge.

“I saw it from the first,” said the large one who put the bread in the oven. “Humility of the spirit. So rare in these girls.”

“I saw it too,” said the other one with great satisfaction. She sighed quietly. “If only it was me.”

now N Leopolda was kneeling bolt upright, face blazing and twitching, a barely held fountain of blasting poison.

“Christ has marked me,” I agreed.

I smiled the saint’s smirk into her face. And then I looked at her.

That was my mistake.

For I saw her kneeling there. Leopolda with her soul like a rubber over boot With her face of a starved rat. With the desperate eyes drowning in the deep wells of her wrongness. There would be no one else after me. And I would leave. I saw Leopolda kneeling within the shambles of her love.

My heart had been about to surge from my chest with the blackness of my joyous heat. Now it dropped. I pitied her. I pitied her. Pity twisted in my stomach like that hook-pole was driven through me. I was caught. It was a feeling more terrible than any amount of boiling water and worse than being forked. Still, still, I could not help what I did.

I had already smiled in a saint’s mealy forgiveness. I heard myself speaking gently.

“Receive the dispensation of my sacred blood,” I whispered.

But there was no heart in it. No joy when she bent to touch the floor.

No dark leaping. I fell back into the white pillows. Blank dust was whirling through the light shafts. My skin was dust.

Dust my lips. Dust the dirty spoons on the ends of my feet.

Rise up! I thought. Rise up and walk! There is no limit to this dust!

L WILD GEESE Gr (1934)

NECTOR KASHPAW

On Friday mornings, I go down to the sloughs with my brother Eli and wait for the birds to land. We have built ourselves a little blind.

Eli has second sense and an aim I cannot match, but he is shy and doesn’t like to talk. In this way it is a good partnership.

Because I got sent to school, I am the one who always walks into town and sells what we shoot. I get the price from the Sisters, who cook for the priests, and then I come home and split the money in half Eli usually takes his bottle off into the woods, while I go into town, to the fiddle dance, and spark the girls.

So there is a Friday near sundown, the summer I am out of school, that finds me walking up the hill with two geese slung from either wrist, tied with leather bands. just to set the record clear, I am a good-looking boy, tall and slim, without my father’s belly hanging in the way. I can have the pick of girls, is what I’m saying. But that doesn’t matter anyhow, because I have already decided that Lulu Nanapush is the one. She is the only one of them I want.

I am thinking of her while I walk-those damn eyes of hers, sharp as ice picks, and the curl of her lips. Her figure is round and plush, yet just at the edge of slim. She is small, yet she will never be an armful or an eyeful because I’ll never get a bead on her. I know that even now. She never stops moving long enough for me to see her all in a piece. I catch the gleam on her hair, the flash of her arm, a sly turn of hip. Then she is gone. I think of her little wet tongue and I have to stop then and there, in my tracks, at the taste that floods into my mouth. She is a tart berry full of juice, and I know she is mine. I cannot wait for the night to start. She will be waiting in the bush.

Because I am standing there, lost on the empty road, half drowned in the charms of Lulu, I never see Marie Lazarre barrel down. In fact, I never even hear her until it is too late. She comes straight down like a wagon unbraked, like a damn train. Her eye is on me, glaring under a stained strip of sheet. Her hand is wound tight in a pillowcase like a boxer’s fist.

“Whoa,” I say, “slow down girl.”

“Move aside,” she says.

She tries to pass. Out of reflex I grab her arm, and then I see the initialed pillowcase. SHC is written on it in letters red as wine.

Sacred Heart Convent. What is it doing on her arm? They say I am smart as a whip around here, but this time I am too smart for my own good.

Marie Lazarre is the youngest daughter of a family of horse-thieving drunks. Stealing sacred linen fits what I know of that blood, so I assume she is running off with the Sisters’ pillowcase and other valuables. Who knows? I think a chalice might be hidden beneath her skirt. It occurs to me, next moment, I may get a money bonus if I bring her back.

And so, because I am saving for the French-style wedding band I intend to put on the finger of Lulu Nanapush, I do not let Marie Lazarre go down the hill.

Not that holding on to her is easy.

“Lemme go, you damn Indian,” she hisses. Her teeth are strong looking, large and white. “You stink to hell!”

I have to laugh. She is just a skinny white girl from a family so low you cannot even think they are in the same class as Kashpaws. I shake her arm. The dead geese tied to my wrist swing against her hip.

I never move her. She is planted solid as a tree.

She begins to struggle to get loose, and I look up the hill. No one coming from that direction, or down the road, so I let her try. I am playing with her. Then she kicks me with her hard-sole shoe.

“Little girl,” I growl, “don’t play with fire!”

Maybe I shouldn’t do this, but I twist her arm and screw it up tight.

Then I am ashamed of myself because tears come, suddenly, from her eyes and hang bitter and gleaming from her lashes. So I let up for a moment.

She moves away from me. But it is just to take aim. Her brown eyes glaze over like a wounded mink’s, hurt but still fighting vicious. She launches herself forward and rams her knee in my stomach.

I lose my balance and pitch over. The geese pull me down.

Somehow in falling I grip the puffed sleeve of her blouse and tear it from her shoulder.

There I am, on the ground, sprawled and burdened by the geese, clutching that sky-color bit of cloth. I think at first she will do me more damage with her shoes. But she just stands glaring down on me, rail-tough and pale as birch, her face loose and raging beneath the white cloth. I think that now the tears will spurt out. She will sob.

But Marie is the kind of tree that doubles back and springs up, whips singing.

She bends over lightly and snatches the sleeve from my grip.

“Lay there you ugly sonofabitch,” she says.

I never answer, never say one word, just surge forward, knock dd her: over and roll on top of her and hold her pinned down underneath my whole length.

“Now we’ll talk, skinny white girl, dirty Lazarre!” I yell in her face.

The geese are to my advantage now; their weight on my arms helps pin her; their dead wings flap around us; their necks loll, and their black eyes stare, frozen. But Marie is not the kind of girl to act frightened of a few dead geese.

She stares into my eyes, furious and silent, her lips clenched white.

“Just give me that pillowcase,” I say, “and I’ll let you go. I’m gonna bring that cloth back to the nuns.”

She burns up at me with such fierceness, then, that I think she hasn’t understood what a little thing I am asking. Her eyes are tense and wild, animal eyes. My neck chills.

“There now,” I say in a more reasonable voice, “quit clutching it and I’ll let you up and go. You shouldn’t have stole it.”

“Stole it!” she spits. “Stole!”

Her mouth drops wide open. If I want I could look all the way down her throat. Then she makes an odd rasp file noise, cawing like a crow.

She is laughing! It is too much. The Lazarre is laughing in my face!

“Stop that.” I put my hand across her mouth. Her slick white teeth click, harmless, against my palm, but I am not satisfied.

“Lemme up,” she mumbles.

“No,” I say.

She lays still, then goes stiller. I look into her eyes and see the hard tears have frozen in the corners. She moves her legs. I keep her down. Something happens. The bones of her hips lock to either side’ of my hips, and I am held in a light vise. I stiffen like I am shocked. It hits me then I am lying full length across a woman, not a girl. Her breasts graze my chest, soft and pointed. I bow cannot help but lower myself the slightest bit to feel them better.

And then I am caught. I give way. I cannot help myself, because, to my everlasting wonder, Marie is all tight plush acceptance, graceful movements, little ‘abs that lead me underneath her skirt where she is slick, warm, silk.

When I come back, and when I look down on her, I know how badly I have been weakened. Her tongue flattens against my palm. I know that when I take my hand away the girl will smile, because somehow I have been beaten at what I started on this hill. And sure enough, when I take my hand away she speaks.

“I’ve had better.”

I know that isn’t true, that I was just now the first, and I can even hear the, shake in her voice, but that makes no difference.

She scares me. I scramble away from her, holding the geese in front.

Although she is just a little girl knocked down in the dirt, she sits up, smooth as you please, fixes the black skirt over her knees, rearranges the pillowcase tied around her hand.

We are unsheltered by bushes. Anyone could have seen us.

I glance around. On the hill, the windows dark in the whitewashed brick seem to harbor a thousand holy eyes widening and narrowing.

How could I? It is then I panic, mouth hanging open, all but certain.

They saw! I can hardly believe what I have done.

Marie is watching me. She sees me swing blind to the white face of the convent. She knows exactly what is going through my mind.

“I hope they saw it,” she says in the crow’s rasp.

I shut my mouth, then open it, then shut my mouth again.

Who is this girl? I feel my breath failing like a stupid fish in the airless space around her. I lose control.

“I never did!” I shout, breaking my voice. I whirl to her. She is looking at the geese I hold in front to hide my shame. I speak wildly.

A

“A -all from.

“You made me! You forced me!”

“I made you!” She laughs and shakes her hand, letting the pillowcase drop clear so that I can see the ugly wound.

“I didn’t make you do anything,” she says.

Her hand looks bad, cut and swollen, and it has not been washed.

Even afraid as I am, I cannot help but feel how bad her hand must hurt and throb. Thinking this causes a small pain to shoot through my own hand. The girl’s hand must have hurt when I threw her on the ground, and yet she didn’t cry out. Her head, too. I have to wonder what is under the bandage. Did the nuns catch her and beat her when she tried to steal their linen?

The dead birds feel impossibly heavy. I untie them from my wrists and let them fall in the dirt. I sit down beside her.

“You can take these birds home. You can roast them,” I say

“I am giving them to you.”

J Her mouth twists. She tosses her head and looks away.

I’m not ashamed, but there are some times this happens: alone in the woods, checking the trap line I find a wounded animal that hasn’t died well, or, worse, it’s still living, so that I have to put it out of its misery. Sometimes it’s just a big bird I only winged. When I do what I have to do, my throat swells closed sometimes. I touch the suffering bodies like they were killed saints I should handle with gentle reverence.

This is how I take Marie’s hand. This is how I hold her wounded hand in my hand.

She never looks at me. I don’t think she dares let me see her face.

We sit alone. The sun falls down the side of the world and the hill goes dark. Her hand grows thick and fevered, heavy in my own, and I don’t want her, but I want her, and I cannot let go.

bob..-, THE BEADS r a S (1948)

MARIE KASHPAW

I didn’t want June Morrissey when they first brought her to my house.

But I ended up keeping her the way I would later end up keeping her son, Lipsha, when they brought him up the steps. I didn’t want her because I had so many mouths I couldn’t feed. I didn’t want her because I had to pile the children in a cot at night. One of the babies slept in a drawer to the dresser. I didn’t want June.

Sometimes we had nothing to eat but grease on bread. But then the two drunk ones told me how the girl had survived-by eating pine sap in the woods. Her mother was my sister, Lucille. She died alone with the girl out in the bush.

“We don’t know how the girl done it,” said the old drunk woman who I didn’t claim as my mother anymore.

“Lucille was coughing blood,” offered the Morrissey, the whining no-good who had not church-married my sister.

–OEM

“You dog,” I said. “Where were you when she died?”

“He was working in the potato fields,” the old drunk one wheedled.

Her eyes had squeezed back into her face. Her nose had spread and her cheeks were shot with black veins.

“He was rolling in his own filth more like it,” I said.

They were standing on my steps because I would not ask them onto my washed floor,

“I can’t take in another wild cat,” I said. Maybe it scared me, the feeling I might have for this one. I knew how it was to lose a child that got too special. I’d lost a boy. I had also lost a girl who would have almost been the age this poor stray was.

Those Lazarres just stood there, yawning and picking their gray teeth, with the girl between them most likely drunk too. Not older than nine years. She could hardly stand upright. I looked at her.

What I saw was starved bones, a shank of black strings, a piece of rag on her I wouldn’t have used to wipe a pig. There were beads around her neck. Black beads on a silver chain.

“What’s that, a rosary on her neck?”