Love Medicine

A

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

_”A

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?”

all

“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.

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.

spoon, I I I Lynette was weary, eyes watery and red. Her tan hair, caught in a stiff club, looked as though it had been used to drag her here.

“You don’t got any children, do you Albertine,” she said, holding the spoon away, licking it herself, making a disgusted face.

“So you wouldn’t know how they just can’t leave anything alone!”

“She’s not married yet,” said Zelda, dangling a bright plastic bundle of keys down to the baby. “She thinks she’ll wait for her baby until after she’s married. Oochy koo,” she crooned when King junior focused and, in an effort of intense delight, pulled the keys down to himself.

Lynette bolted up, shook the keys roughly from his grasp, and snatched him into the next room. He gave a short outraged wail, ANN A then fell silent, and after a while Lynette emerged, pulling down her blouse. The cloth was a dark violet bruised color.

“Thought you wanted to see the gravestone,” Aurelia quickly remembered, addressing Zelda. “You better get going before it’s dark out. Tell King you want him to take you up there.”

“I suppose,” said Mama, turning to me,

“Aurelia didn’t see those two cases of stinking beer in their backseat. I’m not driving anywhere with a drunk.”

“He’s not a drunk!” Lynette wailed in sudden passion. “But I’d drink a few beers too if I had to be in this family.”

Then she whirled and ran outside.

King was slumped morosely in the front seat of the car, a beer clenched between his thighs. He drummed his knuckles to the Oak Ridge Boys.

“I don’t even let her drive it,” he said when I asked. He nodded toward Lynette, who was strolling down the driveway ditch, adding to a straggly bunch of prairie roses. I saw her bend over, tearing at a tough branch.

“She’s going to hurt her hands.”

“On, she don’t know nothing,” said King. “She never been to school.

I seen a little of the world when I was in the service. You get my picture?”

He’d sent a photo of himself in the uniform. I’d been surprised when I saw the picture because I’d realized then that my rough w boy cousin had developed hard cheekbones and a movie-star gaze. Now, brooding under the bill of his blue hat, he turned that moody stare through the windshield and shook his head at his wife. “She don’t fit in, he said.

“She’s fine,” I surprised myself by saying. “Just give her a chance.

“Chance. ” King tipped his beer up. “Chance. She took her chance when she married me. She knew which one I took after.”

Then as if on cue, the one whom King did not take after drove into the yard with a squealing flourish, laying hard on his horn.

Uncle Gordie Kashpaw was considered good-looking, although not in the same way as his son King. Gordle had a dark, round, eager face, creased and puckered from being stitched up after an accident. There was always a compelling pleasantness about him. In some curious way all the stitches and folds had contributed to, rather than detracted from, his looks. His face was like something valuable that was broken and put carefully back together. And all the more lovable for the care taken.

In the throes of drunken inspiration now, he drove twice around the yard before his old Chevy chugged to a halt. Uncle Eli got out.

“Well it’s still standing up,” Eli said to the house. “And so am I.

But you,” he addressed Gordie, “ain’t.”

It was true, Gordie’s feet were giving him trouble. They caught on things as he groped on the hood and pulled himself out. The rubber foot mat, the fenders, then the little ruts and stones as he clambered toward the front steps.

“Zelda’s in there,” King shouted a warning, “and Grandma too! ” Gordie sat down on the steps to collect his wits before tangling with them.

Inside, Uncle Eli sat down next to his twin. They didn’t look much alike anymore, for Eli had Wizened and toughened while Grandpa was larger, softer, even paler than his brother. They happened to be dressed the same though, in work pants and jackets, except that Grandpa’s outfit was navy blue and Eli’s was olive green. Eli wore a stained, crumpled cap that seemed so much a part of his head not even Zelda thought of asking him to remove it. He nodded at Grandpa and grinned at the food; he had a huge toothless smile that took up his entire face.

“Here’s my Uncle Eli,” Aurelia said, putting down the plate of JW food for him. “Here’s my favorite uncle. See, Daddy?

Uncle Eli’s here. Your brother.”

“Oh Eli,” said Grandpa, extending his hand. Grandpa grinned and nodded at his brother, but said nothing more until Eli started to eat.

“I don’t eat very much anymore. I’m getting so old,” Eli was telling us.

“You’re eating a lot,” Grandpa pointed out. “Is there going to be anything left?”

“You ate already,” said Grandma. “Now sit still and visit with your brother.” She fussed a little over Eli. “Don’t mind him. Eat enough.

You’re getting thin.”

“It’s too late,” said Grandpa. “He’s eating everything.”

He closely watched each bite his brother took. Eli wasn’t bothered in the least. Indeed, he openly enjoyed his food for Grandpa.

“Oh, for heaven sake Zelda sighed. “Are we ever getting out of here?

Aurelia. Why don’t you take separate cars and drive us in?

It’s too late to see that gravestone now anyway, but I’m darned if I’m going to be here once they start on those cases in the back of June’s car.”

“Put the laundry out,” said Grandma; “I’m ready enough. And you, Albertine”-she nodded at me as they walked out the door-“they can eat all they want. just as long as they save the pies. Them pies are made special for tomorrow.”

“Sure you don’t want to come along with us now?” asked Mama.

“She’s young,” said Aurelia. “Besides, she’s got to keep those drunken men from eating on those pies.”

She bent close to me. Her breath was sweet with cake frosting, stale with cigarettes. JAIN

“I’ll be back later on,” she whispered. “I got to go see a friend.”

Then she winked at me exactly the way June had winked about-OEM her secret friends. One eye shut, the lips pushed into a small selfdeprecating question mark.

Grandpa eased himself into the backseat and sat as instructed, arms spread to either side, holding down the plies of folded laundry

“They can eat!” Grandma yelled once more. “But save them pies! ” She bucked forward when Aurelia’s car lurched over the hole in the drive, and then they shot over the hill.

“Say Albertine, did you know your Uncle Eli is the last man on the reservation that could snare himself a deer?”

Gordie unlatched a beer, pushed it across the kitchen table to me.

We were still at that table, only now the plates, dish pans of salad, and pies were cleared away for ashtrays, beer, packs of cigarettes.

Although Aurelia kept the house now, it was like communal property for the Kashpaws. There was always someone camped out or sleeping on her fold-up cots.

One more of us had arrived by this time. That was Lipsha Morrissey, who had been taken in by Grandma and always lived with us. Lipsha sat down, with a beer in his hand like everyone, and looked at the floor.

He was in ore a listener than a talker, a shy one with a wide, sweet, intelligent face. He had long eyelashes.

“Girl-eyes,” King used to tease him. King had beat up Lipsha so many times when we were young that Grandma wouldn’t let them play on the same side of the yard. They still avoided each other. Even now, in the small kitchen, they never met each other’s eyes or said hello.

I had to wonder, as I always did, how much they knew.

One secret I had learned from sitting quietly around the aunts, from gathering shreds of talk before they remembered me, was Lipsha’s secret, or half of It at least. I knew who his mother was.

And because I knew his mother I knew the reason he and King never got along. They were half brothers. Lipsha was June’s boy, born in one of those years she left Gordic. Once you knew about her, and looked at him, it was easy to tell. He had her flat pretty features and slim grace, only on him these things had never even begun to harden.

Right now he looked anxious and bit his lips. The men were still talking about the animals they had killed.

“I had to save on my shells,” said Eli thoughtfully; “they was dear.

“Only real old-time Indians know deer good enough to snare,” Gordie said to us. “Your Uncle Eli’s a real old-timer.”

“You remember the first thing you ever got?” Eli asked King.

King looked down at his beer, then gave me a proud, sly, sideways glance. “A gook, ” he said. “I was in the Marines.”

Lipsha kicked the leg of my chair. King made much of having been in combat but was always vague on exactly where and when he had seen action,

“Skunk,” Gordie raised his voice. “King got himself a skunk when he was ten.”

“Did you ever eat a skunk?” Eli asked me.

“It’s like a piece of cold chicken,” I ventured. Eli and Gordic agreed with solemn grins.

“How do you skin your skunk?” Eli asked King.

King tipped his hat down, shading his eyes from the fluorescent kitchen ring. A blue-and-white patch had been stitched on the front of his hat.

“World’s Greatest Fisherman,” it said. King put his hands up in winning ignorance.

“How do you skin your skunk?” he asked Eli.

“You got to take the glands off first,” Eli explained carefully, ML — also IN pointing at different parts of his body. “Here, here, here. Then you skin it just like anything else. You have to boll it in three waters.

“Then you honestly eat it?” said Lynette. She had come into the room with a fresh beer and was now biting contentedly on a frayed end string of hair fallen from her ponytail.

Ell sat up straight and tilted his little green hat back.

“You picky too? Like Zelda! One time she came over to visit me with her first husband, that Swede Johnson. It was around dinnertime. I had a skunk dressed out, and so I fed it to them.

Ooooooh when she found out what she ate she was mad at me, boy.

“Skunk!” she says. “How disgusting! You old guys will eat anything!”

Lipsha laughed.

“I’d eat it,” Lynette declared to him, flipping her hair back with a chopping motion of her hand. “I’d eat it Just like that.”

“You’d eat shit,” said King.

I stared at his clean profile. He was staring across the table at Lipsha, who suddenly got up from his chair and walked out the door.

The screen door slammed. King’s lip curled down in some imitation of soap-opera bravado, but his chin trembled. I saw him clench his jaw and then felt a kind of wet blanket sadness coming down over us all. I wanted to follow Lipsha. I knew where he had gone. But I didn’t leave.

Lynette shrugged brightly and brushed away King’s remark. But it stayed at the table, as if it had opened a door on something-some sad, ugly scene we could not help but enter. I took a long drink and leaned toward Uncle Eli,

“A fox sleeps hard, eh?” said Eli after a few moments.

King leaned forward and pulled his hat still lower so it seemed to rest on his nose.

“I’ve shot a fox sleeping before,” he said. “You know that little black hole underneath a fox’s tall? I shot right through there. I was using a bow and my arrow went right through that fox. It got stiff.

It went straight through the air. Flattened out like a flash and was gone down its hole. I never did get it out.”

“Never shot a bow either,” said Gordie.

“Hah, you’re right. I never shot a bow either,” admitted King with a strange, snarling little laugh. “But I heard of this guy once who put his arrow through a fox then left it thrash around in the bush until he thought it was dead. He went in there after it. You know what he found? That fox had chewed the arrow off either side of its body and it was gone.”

“They don’t got that name for nothing,” Ell said.

“Fox,” said Gordie, peering closely at the keyhole in his beer.

“Can you gimme a cigarette, Ell?” King asked.

“When you ask for a cigarette around here,” said Gordie, “you d on’t say can I have a cigarette. You say ciga swa?”

“Them Michifs ask like that,” Eli said. “You got to ask a real old Cree like me for the right words.”

“Tell ‘em Uncle Eli,” Lynette said with a quick burst of drunken enthusiasm. “They’ve got to learn their own heritage!

When you go it will all be gone!”

“What you saying there, woman. Hey!” King shouted, filling the kitchen with the jagged tear of his voice. “When you talk to my relatives have a little respect. ” He put his arms up and shoved at her breasts.

“You bet your life, Uncle Eli,” he said more quietly, leaning back on the table. “You’re the greatest hunter. But I’m the World’s Greatest Fisherman.”

“No you ain’t,” Eli said. His voice was effortless and happy- “I caught a fourteen-inch trout.”

King looked at him carefully, focusing with difficulty. “You’re the greatest then,” he admitted. “Here.”

He reached over and plucked away Eli’s greasy olive-drab hat.

Eli’s head was brown, shiny through the white crew-cut stubble.

want King took off his blue hat and pushed it down on Eli’s head.

The hat slipped over Eli’s eyes.

“It’s too big for him!” Lynette screamed in a tiny outraged voice.

King adjusted the hat’s plastic tab.

“I gave you that hat, King! That’s your best hat!” Her voice rose sharply in its trill. “You don’t give that hat away!”

Ell sat calmly underneath the hat. It fit him perfectly. He seemed oblivious to King’s sacrifice and just sat, his old cap perched on his knee, turning the can around and around in his hand without drinking.

King swayed to his feet, clutched the stuffed plastic backrest of the chair. His voice was ripped and swollen. “Uncle Ell.” He bent over the old man. “Uncle Ell, you’re my uncle.”

“Damn right,” Eli agreed.

“I always thought so much of you, my uncle!” cried King in a loud, unhappy wall.

“Damn right,” said Eli. He turned to Gordie. “He’s drunk on his behind. I got to agree with him.”

“I think the fuckin’ world of you, Uncle!”

“Damn right. I’m an old man,” Eli said in a flat, soft voice.

King suddenly put his hands up around his ears and stumbled out the door.

“Fresh air be good for him,” said Gordie, relieved. “Say there, Albertine. You ever hear this one joke about the Indian, the Frenchman, and the Norwegian in the French Revolution?”

“Issat a Norwegian joke?” Lynette asked. “Hey. I’m full blooded Norwegian. I don’t know nothing about my family, but I know I’m full-blooded Norwegian.”

“No, it’s not about the Norwegians really,” Gordie went on.

“So anyway …”

Nevertheless she followed King out the door.

At JO” “There were these three. An Indian. A Frenchman. A Norwegian.

They were all in the French Revolution. And they were all set for the guillotine, right? But when they put the Indian in there the blade ‘just came halfway down and got stuck.”

“Fuckin’ bitch! Gimme the keys!” King screamed ‘just outside the door.

Gordie paused a moment. There was silence. He continued the joke.

“So they said it was the judgment of God. You can go, they said to the Indian. So the Indian got up and went. Then it was the Frenchman’s turn. They put his neck in the vise and were all set to execute him!

But it happened the same. The blade stuck.”

“Fuckin’bitch! Fuckin’bitch!” King shrieked again.

The car door slammed. Gordie’s eyes darted to the door, back to me with questions.

“Should we go out?” I said.

But he continued the story. “And so the Frenchman went off and he was saved. But when it came to the Norwegian, see, the Norwegian looks up at the uillotine and says: “You guys are sure dumb. If you put a little grease on it that thing would work fine!” “Bitch! Bitch! I’ll kill you! Girrime the keys!” We heard a quick shattering sound, glass breaking, and left Eli sitting at the table.

Lynette was locked in the Firebird, crouched on the passen’de. King screamed at her and threw his whole body against her side of the car, thudded on the hood with hollow booms, banged his way across the roof, ripped at antennae and side-view mirrors with his fists, kicked into the broken sockets of headlights. Finally he ripped a mirror off the driver’s side and began to beat the car rhythmically, gasping. But though He swung the mirror time after time into the windshield and side windows he couldn’t smash them.

“King, baby!” Gordie jumped off the steps and hugged King to the ground with the solid drop of his weight. “It’s her car. You’re June’s boy, King. Don’t cry.” For as they lay there, welded in — Mom shock, King’s face was grinding deep into the cinders and his shoulders shook with heavy sobs. He screamed up through dirt at his father.

“It’s awful to be dead. Oh my God, she’s so cold.”

They were up on their feet suddenly. King twisted out of Gordie’s arms and balanced in a wrestler’s stance. “It’s your fault and you wanna take the car,” he said wildly. He sprang at his — father but Gordie stepped back, bracing himself, and once again he folded King violently into his arms, and again King sobbed and sagged against his father.

Gordic lowered him back into the cinders. While they were clenched, Lynette slipped from the car and ran into the house. I followed her.

She rushed through the kitchen, checked the baby, and then she came back.

“Sit down,” I said. I had taken a chair beside Eli.

“Uh, uh.”

She walked over to Eli. She couldn’t be still.

“You got troubles out there,” he stated.

“Yeah,” she said. “His mom gave him the money!” She sneaked a cigarette from Eli’s pack, giving him a coy smirk in return. “Because she wanted him to have responsibility. He never had responsibility.

She wanted him to take care of his’ family

Eli nodded and pushed the whole pack toward her when she stubbed out the cigarette half smoked. She lit another.

“You know he really must love his uncle,” she cried in a small, hard voice. She plumped down next to Eli and steadily smiled at the blue hat. “That fishing hat. It’s his number-one hat. I got that patch for him. King. They think the world of him down in the Cities.

Everybody knows him. They know him by that hat. It’s his number one.

You better never take it off.”

Eli took the hat off and turned it around in his hands. He squinted at the patch and read it aloud. Then he nodded, as if it had finally dawned on him what she was talking about, and he turned it back around.

“Let me wear it for a while,” Lynette cajoled. Then she took it.

L Put it on her head and adjusted the brim. “There it is.”

Uncle Eli took his old cap off his knee and put it on his head.

“This one fits me,” he said.

In the next room King junior began to cry

“Oh, my baby!” Lynette shrieked as if he were in danger and darted out. I heard her murmuring King’s name when the father and the son walked back inside. King sat down at the table and put his head in his folded arms, breathing hoarsely. Gordie got the keys from Lynette and told Eli they were going home now.

“He’s okay,” Gordie said, nodding at King. “Just as long as you let him alone.”

So they drove off on that clear blue night. I put a blanket around Lynette’s shoulders, and she sank onto the couch. I walked out, past King. He was still breathing hopelessly into his crossed arms. I walked down to where I knew Lipsha was, at the bottom of the hill below the house. Sure enough, he was sitting there, back against a log from the woodpile. He passed me a bottle of sweet ros;, I drank. I tipped the bottle, looked up at the sky, and nearly fell over, in amazement and too much beer, at the drenching beauty.

Northern lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha’s arm. We floated into the field and sank down, crushing green wheat. We chewed the sweet kernels and stared up and were lost. Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green licks of light pulsed and faded across it.

Living lights. Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a Pttern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it.

As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. Or a dance hall.

And all the world’s wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. She would be dancing if there was a dance hall in space. She would be dancing a two-step for wandering souls.

Her long legs lifting and failing. Her laugh an ace. Her sweet perfume the way all grownup women were supposed to smell.

Her amusement at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons.

I had to close my eyes after a while. The mix of beer and rose made my head whirl. The lights, shooting high, made the ground rock underneath me. I waved away the bottle when Lipsha touched my hand with the cold end of it.

“Don’t want no more?”

“Later on,” I said. “Keep talking.”

Lipsha’s voice was a steady bridge over a deep black space of sickness I was crossing. If I ‘just kept listening I knew I’d get past all right.

He was talking about King. His voice was slurred and dreamy.

“I’ll admit that,” he said,

“I’m scared of his mind. You can’t never predict when he’ll turn. Once, a long time ago, we went out hunting gophers. I let him get behind me. You know what he did? He hid in the bushes and took a potshot.”

“Lucky. ” “That’s right. I steer clear of King. I never turn my back on him, either. ” “Don’t be scared of him,” I said. I was managing to keep a slim hold on the conversation. I could do this as long as I only moved my lips and not the rest of me.

Sure. King never took a potshot at you.”

“He’s scared underneath.”

“Of what?” said Lipsha.

But I really didn’t know. “Those vets,” I said, “are really nuts.”

“He’s no vet,” Lipsha began. But then blackness swung too hard, tipping me. For a while I heard nothing, saw nothing, and did not even dare move my lips to speak. That didn’t matter.

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 … …I 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 ….. 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 cocked 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 June…. 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 shells were stuck to the wall and some were turned completely upside down. Chunks of rhubarb were scraped across the floor. Meringue dripped from the towels.

“The pies!” I shrieked. “You goddamn sonofabitch, 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 passion. 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)