Love Medicine

LJPSHA MORRISSEY

I never really done much with my life, I suppose. I never had a television. Grandma Kashpaw had one inside her apartment at the Senior Citizens, so I used to go there and watch my favorite shows. For a while she used to call me the biggest waste on the reservation and hark back to how she saved me from my own mother, who wanted to tie me in a potato sack and throw me in a slough. Sure, I was grateful to Grandma Kashpaw for saving me like that, for raising me, but gratitude gets old.

After a while, stale. I had to stop thanking her. One day I told her I had paid her back in full by staying at her beck and call.

I’d do anything for Grandma. She knew that. Besides, I took care of Grandpa like nobody else could, on account of what a handful he’d gotten to be.

But that was nothing. I know the tricks of mind and body in side out without ever having trained for it, because I got the touch.

It’s a thing you got to be born with. I got secrets in my hands that nobody ever knew to ask. Take Grandma Kashpaw with her tired veins all knotted up in her legs like clumps of blue

“Is. I take my fingers and I snap them on the knots. The niedisnal cine flows out of me. The touch.

I run my fingers up the maps of those rivers of veins or I knock very gentle above their hearts or I make a circling motion on their stomachs, and it helps them.

They feel much better. Some women pay me five dollars.

I couldn’t do the touch for Grandpa, though. He was a hard nut. You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where. There is this woman here, “Lulu Lamartine, who always had a thing for Grandpa.

She loved him since she was a girl and always said he was a genius.

Now she says that his mind got so full it exploded.

How can I doubt that? I know the feeling when your mental power builds up too far. I always used to say that’s why the Indians got drunk. Even statistically we’re the smartest people on the earth.

Anyhow with Grandpa I couldn’t hardly believe it, because all my youth he stood out as a hero to me. When he started getting toward second childhood he went through different moods. He would stand in the woods and cry at the top of his shirt. It scared me, scared everyone, Grandma worst of all.

Yet He was so smart-do you believe W-that he knew he was getting foolish.

He said so. He told me that December I failed school and come back on the train to Hoopdance. I didn’t have nowhere else to go. He picked me up there and he said it straight out: “I’m getting into my second childhood.” And then he said something else I still remember: “I been chosen for it. I couldn’t say no.” So I figure that a man so smart all his life-tribal chairman and the star of movies and even pictured in the statehouse and on cans of snuff-would know what he’s doing by saying yes. I think he was called to second childhood like anybody else gets a call for the priesthood or the army or whatever. So I really did not listen too hard when the doctor said this was some kind of disease old people got eating too much sugar. You just can’t tell me that a man who went to Washington and gave them bureaucrats what for could lose his mind from eating too much Milky Way. No, he put second childhood on himself Behind those songs he sings out in the middle of Mass, and back of those stories that everybody knows by heart, Grandpa is thinking hard about life. I know the feeling. Sometimes I’ll throw up a smokescreen to think behind.

I’ll hitch up to Winnipeg and play the Space Invaders for six hours, but all the time there and back I will be thinking some fairly deep thoughts that surprise even me, and I’m used to it. As for him, if it was just the thoughts there wouldn’t be no problem.

Smokescreen is what irritates the social structure, see, and Grandpa has done things that ‘just distract people to the point they want to throw him in the cookie Jar where they keep the mentally insane. He’s far from that, I know for sure, but even Grandma had trouble keeping her patience once he started sneaking off to Lamartine’s place. He’s not supposed to have his candy, and Lulu feeds it to him. That’s one of the reasons why he goes.

Grandma tried to get me to put the touch on Grandpa soon after he began stepping out. I didn’t want to, but before Grandma started telling me again what a bad state my bare behind was in when she first took me home, I thought I should at least pretend.

I put my hands on either slide of Grandpa’s head. You wouldn’t look at him and say he was crazy. He’s a fine figure of a man, as Lamartine would say, with all his hair and half his teeth, a beak like a hawk, and cheeks like the blades of a hatchet. They put his picture on all the tourist guides to North Dakota and even copied his face for artistic paintings. I guess you could call him a monument all of himself. He s,started grinning when I put my hands on his templates, and I knew right then he knew how come I touched him. I knew the smokescreen was going to fall.

And I was right: just for a moment it fell.

“Let’s pitch whoopee,” he said across my shoulder to Grandma.

They don’t use that expression much around here anymore, but for damn sure it must have meant something. It got her goat right quick.

She threw my hands off his head herself and stood in front of him, overmatching him pound for pound, and taller too, for she had a growth spurt in middle age while he had shrunk, so now the length and breadth of her surpassed him. She glared up and spoke her piece into his face about how he was off at all hours spoke her piece into his racc avout torricatting and chasing Lamartine again and making a damn old fool of himself

“And you got no more whoopee to pitch anymore anyhow!”

“She yelled at last, surprising me so my jaw ‘just dropped, for us kids all had pretended for so long that those rustling sounds we heard from their side of the room at night never happened. She sure had pretended it, up till now, anyway. I saw that tears were in her eyes.

And that’s when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him. And it gave me a real shock to the system. You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead.

And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind.

So I didn’t know what to do. I was in a laundry then. They was like parents to me, the way they had took me home and reared PI me. I could see her point for wanting to get him back the way he was so at least she could argue with him, sleep with him, not be shamed out by Larriartine.

She’d always love him. That hit me like a ton of bricks.

For one whole day I felt this odd feeling that cramped my hands. When you have the touch, that’s where longing gets you. I never loved like that. It made me feel all inspired to see them fight, and I wanted to go out and find a woman who I would love until one of us died or went crazy. But I’m not like that really. From time to time I heal a person all up good inside, however when it comes to the long shot I doubt that I got staying power.

And you need that, staying power, going out to love somebody.

I knew this quality was not going to jump on me with no effort.

So I turned my thoughts back to Grandma and Grandpa. I felt her side of it with my hands and my tangled guts, and I felt his ‘de of it within the stretch of my mentality. He had gone out to si I I I lunch one day and never came back. He was fishing in the middle of Lake Turcot. And there was big thoughts on his line, and he kept throwing them back for even bigger ones that would explain to him, say, the meaning of how we got here and why we have to leave so soon. All in all, I could not see myself treating Grandpa with the touch, bringing him back, when the real part of him had chose to be off thinking somewhere. It was only the rest of him that stayed around causing trouble, after all, and we could handle most of it without any problem.

Besides, it was hard to argue with his reasons for doing some things.

Take Holy Mass. I used to go there just every so often, when I got frustrated mostly, because even though I know the Higher Power dwells everyplace, there’s something very calming about the cool greenish inside of our mission. Or so I thought, anyway. Grandpa was the one who stripped off my delusions in this matter, for it was he who busted right through what Father Upsala calls the sacred serenity of the place.

We filed in that time. Me and Grandpa. We sat down in our book.-, pews. Then the rosary got started up pre-Mass and that’s when Grandpa filled up his chest and opened his mouth and belted out them words.

HAIL MARIE FULL OF GRACE.

He had a powerful set of lungs.

And he kept on like that. He did not let up. He hollered and he yelled them prayers, and I guess people was used to him by now, because they only muttered theirs and did not quit and gawk like I did. I was getting red-faced, I admit. I give him the elbow once or twice, but that wasn’t nothing to him. He kept on. He shrieked to heaven and he pleaded like a movie actor and he pounded his chest like Tarzan in the Lord I Am Not Worthies. I thought he might hurt himself Then after a while I guess I got used to it, and that’s when I wondered: how come?

So afterwards I out and asked him. “How come? How come you yelled?”

“God don’t hear me otherwise,” said Grandpa Kashpaw.

I sweat. I broke right into a little cold sweat at my hairline because I knew this was perfectly right and for years not one damn other person had noticed it. God’s been going deaf Since the Old Testament, God’s been deafening up on us. I read, see.

Besides the dictionary, which I’m constantly in use of, I had this Bible once. I read it. I found — there was discrepancies between then and now. It struck me. Here God used to raineth bread from clouds, smite the Phillipines, sling fire down on red-light districts where people got stabbed. He even appeared in person every once in a while.

God used to pay attention, is what I’m saying.

Now there’s your God in the Old Testament and there is Chippewa Gods as well. Indian Gods, good and bad, like tricky Nanabozho or the water monster, Missepeshu, who lives over in Lake Turcot. That water monster was the last God I ever heard to appear. It had a weakness for young girls and grabbed one of the Blues off her rowboat. She got to shore all right, but only after Add MEL Attacked this monster had its way with her. She’s an old lady now. Old Lady Blue. She still won’t let her family fish that lake.

Our Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least they come around. They’ll do a favor if you ask them right. You don’t have to yell. But you do have to know, like I said, how to ask in the right way. That makes problems, because to ask proper was an art that was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground. Even now, I have to wonder if Higher Power turned it back, if we got to yell, or if we ‘just don’t speak its language.

I looked around me. How else could I explain what all I bad seen in my short life-King smashing his fist in things, Gordie drinking himself down to the Bismarck hospitals, or Aunt June left by a white man to wander off in the snow. How else to explain the times my touch don’t work, and farther back, to the old time Indians who was swept away in the outright germ warfare and dirty-dog killing of the whites. In those times, us Indians was so much kindlier than now.

We took them in.

Oh yes, I’m bitter as an old cutworm just thinking of how they done to us and doing still.

So Grandpa Kashpaw just opened my eyes a little there. Was there any sense relying on a God whose ears was stopped? just like the government? I says then, right off, maybe we got nothing but ourselves.

And that’s not much, just personally speaking. I know I don’t got the cold hard potatoes it takes to understand everything.

Still, there’s things I’d like to do. For instance, I’d like to help some people like my Grandpa and Grandma Kashpaw get back some happiness within the tail ends of their lives.

I told you once before I couldn’t see my way clear to putting the direct touch on Grandpa’s mind, and I kept my moral there, but something soon happened to make me think a little bit of mental adjustment wouldn’t do him and the rest of us no harm.

It was after we saw him one afternoon in the sunshine court yard of the Senior Citizens with Lulu Lamartine. Grandpa used to like to dig there.

He had his little dandelion fork out, and he was prying up them dandelions right and left while Lamartme watched him.

“He’s scratching up the dirt, all right,” said Grandma, watching Lamartine watch Grandpa out the window.

Now Lamartine was about half the considerable size of Grandma, but you would never think of sizes anyway. They were different in an even more noticeable way. It was the difference between a house fixed up with paint and picky fence, and a house left to weather away into the soft earth, is what I’m saying.

Urnartine was ‘acked up, latticed, shuttered, and vinyl sided, while Grandma sagged and bulged on her slipped foundations and let her hair go the silver gray of rain-dried lumber, Right now, she eyed the Lamartine’s pert flowery dress with such a look it despaired me. I knew what this could lead to with Grandma.

Alterating tongue storms and rock-hard silences was hard on a man, even one who didn’t notice, like Grandpa. So I went fetching him.

But he was gone when I popped through the little screen door that led out on the courtyard. There was nobody out there either, to point which way they went. just the dandelion fork quibbling upright in the ground.

That gave me an idea. I snookered over to the Lamartine’s door and I listened in first, then knocked. But nobody. So I went walking through the lounges and around the card tables. Still nobody.

Finally it was my touch that led me to the laundry room. I cracked the door. I went in. There they were, And he was really loving her up good, boy, and she was going hell for leather. Sheets was flapping on the lines above, and washcloths, pillowcases, shirts was also flying through the air, for they was trying to clear out a place for themselves in a high heaped but shallow laundry cart. The washers and the dryers was all on, chock full of quarters, shaking and moaning. I couldn’t hear what Grandpa and the Lamartine was billing and cooing, and they couldn’t hear me.

I didn’t know what to do, so I went inside and shut the door.

The Lamartine wore a big curly light-brown wig. Looked like one of them squeaky little white-people dogs. Poodles they call them.

Anyway, that wig is what saved us from the-worse. For I could hardly shout and tell them I was in there, no more could I try and grab him.

I was trapped where I was. There was nothing I could really do but hold the door shut. I was scared of somebody else upsetting in and really getting an eyeful. Turned out though, in the heat of the clinch, as I was trying to avert my eyes you see, the Lamartine’s curly wig ‘jumped off her head. And if you ever been in the midst of something and had a big change like that occur in the someone, you can’t help know how it devastates your basic urges. Not only that, but her wig was almost with a life of its own. Grandpa’s eyes were bugging at the change already, and swear to God if the thing didn’t rear up and pop him in the face like it was going to start something. He scrambled up, Grandpa did, and the Lamartine jumped up after him all addled looking. They just stared at each other, huffing and puffing, with quizzical expression. The surprise seemed to drive all sense completely out of Grandpa’s mind.

“The letter was what started the fire,” he said. I never would have done it.”

“What letter?” said the Lamartine. She was stiff-necked now, and elegant, even bald, like some alien queen. I gave her back the wig.

The Lamartine replaced it on her head, and whenever I saw her after that, I couldn’t help thinking of her bald, with special powers, as if from another planet.

“That was a close call,” I said to Grandpa after she had left.

But I think he had already forgot the incident. He just stood there all quiet and thoughtful. You really wouldn’t think he was crazy.

He looked like he was just about to say something imp or bomb.-, tant, explaining himself He said something, all right, but it didn’t have nothing to do with anything that made sense.

He wondered where the heck he put his dandelion fork. That’s when I decided about the mental adjustment.

Now what was mostly our problem was not so much that he was not all there, but that what was there of him often hankered after Lamartine.

If we could put a stop to that, I thought, we might be getting someplace. But here, see, my touch was of no use.

For what could I snap my fingers at to make him faithful to Grandma?

Like the quality of staying power, this faithfulness was invisible. I know it’s something that you got to acquire, but I never known where from. Maybe there’s no rhyme or reason to it, like my getting the touch, and then again maybe it’s a kind of magic.

It was Grandma Kashpaw who thought of it in the end. She knows things.

Although she will not admit she has a scrap of Indian blood in her, there’s no doubt in my mind she’s got some Chippewa. How else would you explain the way she’ll be sitting there, in front of her TV story, rocking in herprinchair and suddenly she turns on me, her brown eyes hard as lake-bed flint.

“Lipsha Morrissey,” she’ll say, “you went out last night and got drunk.

” How did she know that? I’ll hardly remember it myself. Then she’ll say she just had a feeling or ache in the scar of her hand or a creak in her shoulder. She is constantly being told things by little aggravations in her joints or by her household appliances. One time she told Gordie never to ride with a crazy Lamartine boy.

She had seen something in the polished-up tin of her bread toaster.

So he didn’t. Sure enough, the time came we heard how Lyman and Henry went out of control in their car, ending up in the river. Lyman swam to the top, but Henry never made it.

Thanks to Grandma’s toaster, Gordie was probably spared.

hear what Grandpa and the Larnartine was billing and cooing, and they couldn’t hear me.

I didn’t know what to do, so I went inside and shut the door.

The Larnartine wore a big curly light-brown wig. Looked like one of them squeaky little white-people dogs. Poodles they call them.

Anyway, that wig is what saved us from the-worse. For I could hardly shout and tell them I was in there, no more could I try and grab him.

I was trapped where I was. There was nothing I could really do but hold the door shut. I was scared of somebody else upsetting in and really getting an eyeful. Turned out though, in the heat of the clinch, as I was trying to avert my eyes you see, the Larnartine’s curly wig jumped off her head. And if you ever been in the midst of something and had a big change like that occur in the someone, you can’t help know how it devastates your basic urges. Not only that, but her wig was almost with a life of its own. Grandpa’s eyes were bugging at the change already, and swear to God if the thing didn’t rear up and pop him in the face like it was going to start something. He scrambled up, Grandpa did, and the Larnartine jumped up after him all addled looking. They just stared at each other, huffing and puffing, with quizzical expression. The surprise seemed to drive all sense completely out of Grandpa’s mind.

“The letter was what started the fire,” he said. I never would have done it.”

“What letter?” said the Lamartine. She was stiff-necked now, and elegant, even bald, like some alien queen. I gave her back the wig.

The Larnartine replaced it on her head, and whenever I saw her after that, I couldn’t help thinking of her bald, with special powers, as if from another planet.

“That was a close call,” I said to Grandpa after she had left.

But I think he had already forgot the incident. He just stood there all quiet and thoughtful. You really wouldn’t think he was crazy.

He looked like he was just about to say something imp or Someplace in thelblood Grandma Kasbpaw knows things. She also remembers things, I found. She keeps things filed away She’s got a memory like them video games that don’t forget your score. One reason she remembers so many details about the trouble I gave her in early life is so she can flash back her total when she needs to.

Like now. Take the love medicine. I don’t know where she remembered that from. It came tumbling from her mind like an asteroid off the corner of the screen.

Of course she starts out by mentioning the time I had this ‘dent in church and did she leave me there with wet overacci halls? No she didn’t. And ain’t I glad? Yes I am. Now what you want now, Grandma?

But when she mentions them love medicines, I feel my back prickle at the danger. These love medicines is something of an old Chippewa specialty.

No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicines is not for the layman to handle. You don’t just go out and get one without paying for it. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You got to think it over. Choose the right one. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.

So anyhow, I said to Grandma I’d give this love medicine some thought. I knew the best thing was to go ask a specialist like Old Man Pillager, who lives up in a tangle of bush and never shows himself.

But the truth is I was afraid of him, like everyone else. He was known for putting the twisted mouth on people, seizing up their hearts. Old Man Pillager was serious business, and I have always thought it best to steer clear of that whenever I could. That’s why I took the powers in my own hands. That’s why I did what I could.

I put my whole mentality to it, nothing held back. After a while I started to remember things I’d heard gossiped over.

I heard of this person once who carried a charm of seeds that boom.-, looked like baby pearls. They was attracted to a metal knife, which made them powerful. But I didn’t know where them seeds grew.

Another love charm I heard about I couldn’t go along with, because how was I suppose to catch frogs in the act, which it required.

Them little creatures is slippery and fast. And then the power fullest of all, the most extreme, involved nail clips and such. I wasn’t anywhere near asking Grandma to provide me all the little body bits that this last love recipe called for. I went walking around for days ‘just trying to think up something that would work.

Well I got it. If it hadn’t been the early fall of the year, I never would have got it. But I was sitting underneath a tree one day down near the school just watching people’s feet go by when something tells me, look up! Look up! So I look up, and I see two honkers, Canada geese, the kind with little masks on their faces, a bird what mates for life. I see them flying right over my head naturally preparing to land in some slough on the reservation, which they certainly won’t get off of alive.

It hits me, anyway. Them geese, they mate for life. And I think to myself, ‘just what if I went out and got a pair? And just what if I fed some part-say the goose heart-of the female to Grandma and Grandpa ate the other heart? Wouldn’t that work?

Maybe it’s all invisible, and then maybe again it’s magic. Love is a stony road. We know that for sure. If it’s true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say, then we’d be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn’t harm nobody anyway.

I thought it was worth my effort, and Grandma Kashpaw thought so, too.

She had always known a good idea when she heard one. She borrowed me Grandpa’s gun.

So I went out to this particular slough, maybe the exact same slough I never got thrown in by my mother, thanks to Grandma Kashpaw, and I hunched down in a good comfortable pile of rushes. I got my gun loaded up. I ate a few of these soft baloney sandwiches Grandma made me for lunch. And then I waited.

The cattails blown back and forth above my head. Them stringy blue herons was spearing up their prey. The thing I know how to do best in this world, the thing I been training for all my life, is to wait.

Sitting there and sitting there was no hardship on me. I got to thinking about some funny things that happened. There was this one time that Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it, flown up inside her dress and got lost within there. I recalled her running out into the hallway trying to yell something, shaking. She was doing a right good jig there, cutting the rug for sure, and the thing is it never flown out. To this day people speculate where it went. They fear she might perhaps of crushed it in her corsets. It sure hasn’t ever yet been seen alive. I thought of funny things for a while, but then I used them up, and strange things that happened started weaseling their way into my mind, I got to thinking quite naturally of the Larriartine’s cousin named Wristwatch.

I never knew what his real name was. They called him Wristwatch because he got his father’s broken wristwatch as a young boy when his father passed on. Never in his whole life did Wristwatch take his father’s watch off. He didn’t if it worked, although after a while he got sensitive when care people asked what time it was, teasing him. He often put it to his ear like he was listening to the tick. But it was broken for good and forever, people said so, at least that’s what they thought.

Well I saw Wristwatch smoking in his pickup one afternoon and by nine that evening he was dead.

He died sitting at the Larriartine’s table, too. As she told it, Wristwatch had just eaten himself a good-size dinner and she said would he take seconds on the hot dish when he fell over to the floor. They turnt him over. He was gone. But here’s the strange thing: when the Senior Citizen’s orderly took the pulse he noticed that the wristwatch Wristwatch wore was now working. The moment he died the wristwatch started keeping perfect time.

They buried him with the watch still ticking on his arm.

I got to thinking. What if some grave diggers dug up Wristwatch’s casket in two hundred years and that watch was still going? I thought what question they would ask and it was this: Whose hand wound it?

I started shaking like a piece of grass at just the thought.

Not to get off the subject or nothing. I was still hunkered in the slough. It was passing late into the afternoon and still no honkers had touched down. Now I don’t need to tell you that the waiting did not get to me, it was the chill. The rushes was very soft, but damp.

I was getting cold and debating to leave, when they landed. Two geese swimming here and there as big as life, looking deep into each other’s little pinhole eyes. just the ones I was looking for. So I lifted Grandpa’s gun to my shoulder and I aimed perfectly, and blam! Manz! I delivered two accurate shots. But the thing is, them shots missed. I couldn’t hardly believe it. Whether it was that the stock had warped or the barrel got bent some ways I don’t quite know, but anyway them geese flown off into the dim sky, and Lipsha Morrissey was left there in the rushes with evening fallen and his two cold hands empty. He had before him just the prospect of another day of bone-cracking chill in them rushes, and the thought of it got him depressed.

Now it isn’t my style, in no way, to get depressed.

So I said to myself, Lipsha Morrissey, you’re a happy SOB.

who could be covered up with weeds by now down at the bottom of this slough, but instead you’re alive to tell the tale. You might have problems in life, but you still got the touch. You got the power, Lipsha Morrissey. Can’t argue that. So put your mind to it and figure out how not to be depressed.

I took my advice. I put my mind to it. But I never saw at the time how my thoughts led me astray toward a tragic outcome none could have known.

I ignored all the danger, all the limits,

“A

for I was tired of sitting in the slough and my feet were numb. My face was aching. I was chilled, so I played with fire. I told myself love medicine was simple. I told myself the old superstitions was just that-strange beliefs. I told myself to take the ten dollars Mary MacDonald had paid me for putting the touch on her arthritis joint, and the other five I hadn’t spent yet from winning bingo last Thursday. I told myself to go down to the Ked Owl store.

And here is what I did that made the medicine backfire. I took

“I

shortcut. I looked at birds that was dead and froze.

an evi All right. So now I guess you will say,

“Slap a malpractice suit on Lipsha Morrissey.”

I heard of those suits. I used to think it was a color clothing quack doctors had to wear so you could tell them from the good ones.

Now I know better that it’s law.

As I walked back from the Red Owl with the rock-hard, heavy turkeys, I argued to myself about malpractice. I thought of faith. I thought to myself that faith could be called belief against the odds and whether or not there’s any proof. How does that sound? I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that’s not saying it’s not there. And that is faith for you. It’s belief even when the goods don’t deliver. Higher Power makes promises we all know they can’t back up, but anybody ever go and slap an old malpractice suit on God? Or the U. S. government? No they don’t. Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through. So what I’m heading at is this. I finally convinced myself that the real actual power to the love medicine was not the goose heart itself but the faith in the cure.

I didn’t believe it, I knew it was wrong, but by then I had waded so far into my lie I was stuck there. And then I went one step further.

The next day, I cleaned the hearts away from the paper pack — dad ages of gizzards inside the turkeys. Then I wrapped them hearts with a clean hankie and brung them both to get blessed up at the mission. I wanted to get official blessings from the priest, but when Father answered the door to the rectory, wiping his hands on a little towel, I could tell he was a busy man.

“Booshoo, Father,” I said. “I got a slight request to make of you this afternoon. ” “What is it?” he said.

“Would you bless this package?” I held out the hankie with the hearts tied inside it.

He looked at the package, questioning it.

“It’s turkey hearts,” I honestly had to reply.

A look of annoyance crossed his face.

“Why don’t you bring this matter over to Sister Martin,” he said. “I have duties.”

And so, although the blessing wouldn’t be as powerful, I went over to the Sisters with the package.

I rung the bell, and they brought Sister Martin to the door. I had her as a music teacher, but I was always so shy then. I never talked out loud. Now, I had grown taller than Sister Martin.

Looking down, I saw that she was not feeling up to snuff. Brown circles hung under her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” she said, not noticing who I was.

“Remember me, Sister?”

She squinted up at me.

“Oh yes,” she said after a moment. “I’m sorry, you’re the youngest of the Kashpaws. Gordie’s brother.”

Her face warmed up.

“Lipsha,” I said, “that’s my name.”

“Well, Lipsha,” she said, smiling broad at me now, “what can I do for you?”

They always said she was the kindest-hearted of the Sisters up the hill, and she was. She brought me back into their own kitchen and made me take a big yellow wedge of cake and a glass of milk.

“Now tell me,” she said, nodding at my package. “What have you got wrapped up so carefully in those handkerchiefs?”

Like before, I answered honestly.

“Ah, ” said Sister Martin. “Turkey hearts.” She waited.

“I hoped you could bless them.”

She waited some more, smiling with her eyes. Kindhearted though she was, I began to sweat. A person could not pull the wool down over Sister Martin. I stumbled through my mind for an explanation, quick, that wouldn’t scare her off.

“They’re a present,” I said, “for Saint Kateri’s statue.”

“She’s not a saint yet.”

“I know,” I stuttered on, “in the hopes they will crown her.”

“Lipsha,” she said,

“I never heard of such a thing.”

So I told her. “Well the truth is,” I said, “it’s a kind of medicine. ” “For what?”

“Love. ” “Oh Lipsha,” she said after a moment, “you don’t need any medicine. I’m sure any girl would like you exactly the way you are.

I just sat there. I felt miserable, caught in my pack of lies.

“Tell you what,” she said, seeing how bad I felt, “my blessing’ll make any difference anyway. But there is something you won I can do.”

I looked up at her, hopeless.

“Just be yourself ” I looked down at my plate. I knew I wasn’t much to brag about right then, and I shortly became even less. For as I walked out the door I stuck my fingers in the cup of holy water that was sacred from their touches. I put my fingers in and blessed the hearts, quick, with my own hand.

I went back to Grandma and sat down in her little kitchen at the Senior Citizens. I unwrapped them hearts on the table, and her hard agate eyes went soft. She said she wasn’t even going to cook those hearts up but eat them raw so their power would go down strong as possible.

I couldn’t hardly watch when she munch cd hers. Now that’s true love.

I was worried about how she would get Grandpa to eat his, but she told me she’d think of something and don’t worry. So I did not. I was supposed to hide off in her bedroom while she put dinner on a plate for Grandpa and fixed up the heart so he’d eat it. I caught a glint of the plate she was making for him. She put that heart smack on a piece of lettuce like in a restaurant and then attached to it a little heap of boiled peas.

He sat down. I was listening in the next room.

She said,

“Why don’t you have some mash potato?” So he had some mash potato. Then she gave him a little piece of boiled meat. He ate that.

Then she said,

“Why you didn’t never touch your salad yet. See that heart? I’m feeding you it because the doctor said your blood needs building up.”

I couldn’t help it, at that point I peeked through a crack in the door.

I saw Grandpa picking at that heart on his plate with a certain look.

He didn’t look appetized at all, is what I’m saying. I doubted our plan was going to work. Grandma was getting worried, too. She told him one more time, loudly, that he had to eat that heart.

“Swallow it down,” she said. “You’ll hardly notice it.”

He just looked at her straight on. The way he looked at her made me think I was going to see the smokescreen drop a second time, and sure enough it happened.

“What you want me to eat this for so bad?” he asked her uncannily.

Now Grandma knew the jig was up. She knew that he knew — dad she was working medicine. He put his fork down. He rolled the heart around his saucer plate.

“I don’t want to eat this,” he said to Grandma. “It don’t look good.

” “Why it’s fresh grade-A,” she told him. “One hundred percent. ” He didn’t ask percent what, but his eyes took on an even more warier look.

“Just go on and try it, ” she said, taking the salt shaker up in her hand. She was getting annoyed. “Not tasty enough? You want me to salt it for you?” She waved the shaker over his plate.

“All right, skinny white girl!” She had got Grandpa mad.

Oopsy-daisy, he popped the heart into his mouth. I was about to yawn loudly and come out of the bedroom. I was about ready for this crash of wills to be over, when I saw He was still up to his old tricks.

First he rolled it into one side of his cheek. “Mirmunrn, he said.

Then he rolled it into the other side of his cheek.

“Mmmmmirim,” again. Then he stuck his tongue out with the heart on it and put it back, and there was no time to react. He had pulled Grandma’s leg once too far. Her goat was got. She was so mad she hopped up quick as a wink and slugged him between the shoulderblades to make him swallow.

Only thing is, he choked.

He choked real bad. A person can choke to death. You ever sit down at a restaurant table and up above you there is a list of instructions what to do if something slides down the wrong pipe?

It sure makes you chew slow, that’s for damn sure. When Grandpa fell off his chair better believe me that little graphic illustrated poster fled into my mind. I jumped out the bedroom. I done everything within my power that I could do to un lodge what was choking him. I squeezed underneath his ribcage. I socked him in the back. I was desperate.

But here’s the factor of decision: he wasn’t choking on the heart alone.

There was more to it than that. It was other things that choked him as well. It didn’t seem like he wanted to struggle or fight. Death came and tapped his chest, so he went just like that. I’m sorry all through my body at what I done to him with that heart, and there’s those who will say Lipsha Morrissey is just excusing himself off the hook by giving song and dance about how Grandpa gave up.

Maybe I can’t admit what I did. My touch had gone worthless, that is true. But here is what I seen while he lay in my arms.

You hear a person’s life will flash before their eyes when they’re in danger. It was him in danger, not me, but it was his life come over me.

I saw him dying, and it was like someone pulled the shade down in a room. His eyes clouded over and squeezed shut, but just before that I looked in. He was still fishing in the middle of Lake Turcot. Big thoughts was on his line and he had half a case of beer in the boat.

He waved at me, grinned, and then the bobber went under.

Grandma had gone out of the room crying for help. I bunched my force up in my hands and I held him. I was so wound up I couldn’t even breathe.

All the moments he had spent with me, all the times he had hoisted me on his shoulders or pointed into the leaves was concentrated in that moment. Time was flashing back and forth like a pinball machine. Lights blinked and balls hopped and rubber bands chirped, until suddenly I realized the last ball had gone down the drain and there was nothing. I felt his force leaving him, flowing out of Grandpa never to return. I felt his mind weakening. The bobber going under in the lake. And I felt the touch retreat back into the darkness inside my body, from where it came.

One time, long ago, both of us were fishing together. We caught a big old snapper what started towing us around like it was a motor.

“This here fishline is pretty damn good,” Grandpa said.

“Let’s keep this turtle on and see where be takes us.” So we rode along behind that turtle, watching as from time to time it surfaced.

The thing was just about the size of a washtub. It took us all around the lake twice, and as it was traveling, Grandpa said something as a joke. “Lipsha,” he said, “we are glad your mother didn’t want you because we was always looking for a boy like you who would tow us around the lake.”

“I ain’t no snapper. Snappers is so stupid they stay alive when their head’s chopped off,” I said.

“That ain’t stupidity,” said Grandpa. “Their brain’s just in their heart, like yours is.”

When I looked up, I knew the fuse had blown between my heart and my mind and that a terrible understanding was to be given.

Grandma got back into the room and I saw her stumble. And then she went down too. It was like a house you can’t hardly believe has stood so long, through years of record weather, suddenly goes down in the worst yet. It makes sense, is what I’m saying, but you still can’t hardly believe it. You think a person you know has got through death and illness and being broke and living on commodity rice will get through anything. Then they fold and you see how fragile were the stones that underpinned them. You see how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid. You see the stop signs and the yellow dividing markers of roads you traveled and all the instructions you had played according to vanish. You see how all the everyday things you counted on was just a dream you had been having by which you run your whole life.

She had been over me, like a sheer overhang of rock dividing Lipsha Morrissey from outer space. And now she went underneath. It was as though the banks gave way on the shores of Lake Turcot, and where Grandpa’s passing was just the bobber swallowed tinder by his biggest thought, her fall was the house and the rock under it sliding after, sending half the lake splashing up to the clouds.

Where there was nothing.

You play them games never knowing what you see. When I fell into the dream alongside of both of them I saw that the dominions I had defended myself from anciently was but delusions of the screen. Blips of light.

And I was scot-free now, whistling through space.

I don’t know how I come back. I don’t know from where. They was slapping my face when I arrived back at Senior Citizens and they was oxygenating her. I saw her chest move, almost unwilling. She sighed the way she would when somebody bothered her in the middle of a row of beads she was counting. I think it irritated her to no end that they brought her back. I knew from the way she looked after they took the mask off, she was not going to forgive them disturbing her restful peace. Nor was she forgiving Lipsha Morrissey. She had been stepping out onto the road of death, she told the children later at the funeral.

I asked was there any stop signs or dividing markers on that road, but she clamped her lips in a vise the way she always done when she was mad.

Which didn’t bother me. I knew when things had cleared out she wouldn’t have no choice. I was not going to speculate where the blame was put for Grandpa’s death. We was in it together.

She had slugged him between the shoulders, My touch had failed him, never to return.

All the blood children and the took-ins, like me, came home from Minneapolis and Chicago, where they had relocated years ago. They stayed with friends on the reservation or with Aurelia or slept on Grandma’s floor. They were struck down with grief and bereavement to be sure, every one of them. At the funeral I sat down in the back of the church with Albertine. She had gotten all skinny and ragged haired from cramming all her years of study into two or three. She had decided that to be a nurse was not enough for her so she was going to be a doctor.

But the way she was straining her mind didn’t look too hopeful. Her eyes were hefty, bloodshot from driving and crying. She took my hand.

From the back we watched all the children and the mourners as they hunched over their prayers, their hands stuffed full of Kleenex. It was someplace in that long sad service that my vision shifted. I began to see things different, more clear. The family kneeling down turned to rocks in a field. It struck me how strong and reliable grief was, and death. Until the end of time, death would be our rock.

So I had perspective on it all, for death gives you that. All the Kashpaw children had done various things to me in their lives shared their folks with me, loaned me cash, beat me up in secret-and I decided, because of death, then and there I’d call it quits. If I ever saw King again, I’d shake his hand. Forgiving somebody else made the whole thing easier to bear.

Everybody saw Grandpa off into the next world. And then the Kashpaws had to get back to their jobs, which was numerous and impressive. I had a few beers with them and I went back to Grandma, who had sort of got lost in the shuffle of everybody being sad about Grandpa and glad to see one another.

Zelda had sat beside her the whole time and was sitting with her now.

I wanted to talk to Grandma, say how sorry I was, that it wasn’t her fault, but only mine. I would have, but Zelda gave me one of her looks of strict warning as if to say,

“I’ll take care of Grandma. Don’t horn in on the women.”

If only Zelda knew, I thought, the sad realities would change her.

But of course I couldn’t tell the dark truth.

It was evening, late. Grandma’s light was on underneath a crack in the door. About a week had passed since we buried Grandpa. I knocked first but there wasn’t no answer, so I went right in. The door was unlocked.

She was there but she didn’t notice me at first. Her hands were tied up in her rosary, and her gaze was fully absorbed in the easy chair opposite her, the one that had always been Grandpa’s favorite. I stood there, staring with her, at the little green nubs in the cloth and plastic armrest covers and the sad little hair-tonic stain he had made on the white dolly where he laid his head.

For the life of me I couldn’t figure what she was staring at. Thin space. Then she turned.

“He ain’t gone yet,” she said.

Remember that chill I luckily didn’t get from waiting in the slough?

I got it now. I felt it start from the very center of me, where fear hides, waiting to attack. It spiraled outward so that in minutes my fingers and teeth were shaking and clattering. I knew she told the truth. She seen Grandpa. Whether or not he had been there is not the point. She had seen him, and that meant anybody else could see him, too. Not only that but, as is usually the case with these here ghosts, he had a certain uneasy reason to come back. And of course Grandma Kashpaw had scanned it out.

I sat down. We sat together on the co-Lich watching his chair out of the corncr of our eyes. She had found him sitting in his chair when she walked in the door.

“It’s the love medicine, my Lipsha,” she said. “It was stronger than we thought. He came back even after death to claim me to his side.”

I was afraid. “We shouldn’t have tampered with it,” I said. She agreed. For a while we sat still. I don’t know what she thought, but my head felt screwed on backward. I couldn’t accurately consider the situation, so I told Grandma to go to bed. I would sleep on the couch keeping my eye on Grandpa’s chair. Maybe he would come back and maybe he wouldn’t. I guess I feared the one as much as the other, but I got to thinking, see, as I lay there in darkness, that perhaps even through my terrible mistakes some good might come. If Grandpa did come back, I thought he’d return in his right mind. I could talk with him. I could tell him it was all my fault for playing with power I did not understand.

Maybe he’d forgive me and rest in peace. I hoped this. I calmed myself and waited for him all night.

He fooled me though. He knew what I was waiting for, and it wasn’t what he was looking to hear. Come dawn I heard a blood splitting cry from the bedroom and I rushed in there. Grandma turnt the lights on.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed and her face looked harsh, pinched-up, gray.

“He was here,” she said. “He came and laid down next to me in bed.

And he touched me.”

Her heart broke down. She cried. His touch was so cold. She laid back in bed after a while, as it was morning, and I went to the couch.

As I lay there, falling asleep, I suddenly felt Grandpa’s presence and the barrier between us like a swollen river. I felt how I had wronged him, How awful was the place where I had sent him. Behind the wall of death, he’d watched the living eat and cry and get drunk. He was lonesome, but I understood he meant no harm.

“Go back,” I said to the dark, afraid and yet full of pity. “You got to be with your own kind now,” I said. I felt him retreating, like a sigh, growing less. I felt his spirit as it shrunk back through the walls, the blinds, the brick courtyard of Senior Citizens.

“Look up Aunt June,” I whispered as he left.

I slept late the next morning, a good hard sleep allowing the sun to rise and warm the earth. It was past noon when I awoke. There is nothing, to my mind, like a long sleep to make those hard decisions that you neglect under stress of wakefulness. Soon as I woke up that morning, I saw exactly what I’d say to Grandma. I had gotten humble in the past week, not just losing the touch but getting jolted into the understanding that would prey on me from here on out. Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart’s position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after-lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won’t ever come by such a bargain again. Also you have the feeling someone wore it before you and someone will after. I can’t explain that, not yet, but I’m putting my mind to it.

“Grandma,” I said,

“I got to be honest about the love medicine.”

She listened. I knew from then on she would be listening to me the way I had listened to her before. I told her al out the turkey hearts and how I had them blessed. I told her what I used as love medicine was purely a fake, and then I said to her what my understanding brought me.

“Love medicine ain’t what brings him back to you, Grandma.

No, it’s something else. He loved you over time and distance, but be went off so quick he never got the chance to tell you how he loves you, how he doesn’t blame you, how he understands. It’s true feeling, not no magic. No supermarket heart could have brung him back.”

She looked at me. She was seeing the years and days I had no way of knowing, and she didn’t believe me. I could tell this. Yet a look came on her face. It was like the look of mothers drinking sweetness from their children’s eyes. It was tenderness.

“Lipsha, ” she said, “you was always my favorite.”

She took the beads off the bedpost, where she kept them to say at night, and she told me to put out my hand. When I did this, she shut the beads inside of my fist and held them there a long minute, tight, so my hand hurt. I almost cried when she did this.

I don’t really know why. Tears shot up behind my eyelids, and yet it was nothing. I didn’t understand, except her hand was so strong, squeezing mine, The earth was full of life and there were dandelions growing out the window, thick as thieves, already seeded, fat as big yellow plungers. She let my hand go. I got up. “I’ll go out and dig a few dandelions,” I told her.

Outside, the sun was hot and heavy as a hand on my back. I felt it flow down my arms, out my fingers, arrowing through the ends of the fork into the earth. With every root I prized up there was return, as if I was kin to its secret lesson. The touch got stronger as I worked through the grassy afternoon. Uncurling from me like a seed out of the blackness where I was lost, the touch spread. The spiked leaves full of bitter mother’s milk. A buried root. A nuisance people dig up and throw in the sun to wither. A globe of frail seeds that’s indestructible.

THE GOOD TEARS r a a ri (1983) LULU LAMAR TINE 1.

No one ever understood my wild and secret ways. They used to say Lulu Lamartine was like a cat, loving no one, only purring to get what she wanted. But that’s not true. I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms. Sometimes I’d look out on my yard and the green leaves would be glowing. I’d see the oil slick on the wing of a grackle. I’d bear the wind rushing, rolling, like the far-off sound of waterfalls. Then I’d open my mouth wide, my ears wide, my heart, and I’d let everything inside.

After some time I’d swing my door shut and walk back into the house with my eyes closed. I’d sit there like that in my house. I’d sit there with my eyes closed on beauty until it was time to make the pickle brine or smash the boiled berries or the boys came home. But for a while after letting the world in I would be full.

I wouldn’t want anything more but what I had.

And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear.

I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.

There were times.

I’m going to tell you about the men. There were times I let them in just for being part of the world. I believe that angels in the body make us foreign to ourselves when touching. In this way I’d slip my body to earth, like a heavy sack, and for a few moments I would blend in with all that forced my heart. There was this one man I kept trying to forget. The handsome, distinguished man who burnt my house down.

He did it after I got married the third and last time. The fire balded me completely. I doubt I’ll ever marry again.

There’s no time for it anyway. By getting married to Nector Kashpaw I could have perhaps forgot him, but he dawdled. This way, that. He was my first love. We were young. Some nights ‘d talk behind the mission dance hall, and by midnight we’d we I I I have set the date.

Then I wouldn’t see him as the day grew closer.

At length I knew he loved, or at least was taken up with, someone else.

After I had figured that out, I married a riffraff Morrissey for hurt and spite. Then I married again out of fondness. That made twice.

All through this time I made a great pretense to ignore Nector Kashpaw.

“Hello.” I’d see him in town. “How the world have you been?”

And I’d have dreamed about sitting in his lap naked while the green dark rolled down. Or I’d have dreamed about his hands undoing everything.

The one I married for fondness, Henry, died one winter on a dangerous train crossing. I always knew they should have put some automatic bars up out there. He stalled in the middle of a soybean field, or maybe the train did not blow its warning whistle. There’s really no way to ever tell. After the funeral, though, my secret wildness took me over.

The more I think about it, I just never got Nector where I wanted him.

At my mercy, I suppose, so that I could have my will. That’s how I got most of them, strange to say, for I was never any looker. It was just that I kept my youth. They couldn’t take that away. Even bald and half blinded as I am at present, I have my youth and my pleasure.

I still let in the beauty of the world.

It’s a sad world, though, when you can’t get love right even after trying it as many times as I have.

After Henry’s funeral I came home and soaked in the pity of my eight sons, big boys, not a one of them the child of Henry in the factual sense. They were his spawn by force of habit, though.

They kept me company through loneliness. And they would look aside and never notice what my wildness made me do.

It doesn’t seem like twenty-six years ago, but indeed it was that long since I had my house on a beautiful hill that the tribe owned.

Henry had raised it there. It was in that house, during the dead of night, that Kashpaw would visit me after Henry died. I kept a window open on the yard, and he always had himself a pocketful of meat scraps to feed our half-wild dogs. After he climbed in, when he touched me, I would smell that at first. A ripe animal-death smell. I kept a bowl of soap and water by the bed, for I was frightened to have that smell upon my body.

It brought such pictures to mind.

Nobody knows this. When I was seven I found the body of a dead man in the woods. I used to go out there and sweep my secret playhouse, clean my broken pots with leaves, tend to my garden of rocks and feathers. I would go out there and stay for hour upon hour. Nobody knew where to find me, or really looked very hard, anyway. They were used to my going off alone.

My square of swept dirt in the woods is where I found the man.

He laid across my front door as though to guard it from strangers, like a dog. He was so relaxed on his back, hat tipped on his face, that at first I did not think he was dead. I hid in a Juneberry bush and waited for him to wake, to stretch, get up and leave. He was an old ragged burn, dark and lean. His clothes were earthen, a dim cloth of dirt and holes. When he did not move for a long time I stepped out.

I was never a patient thing. Bold and nervous, I took his hat off his face to wake him up.

He had been staring into it. I mean the dark bowl of his little brown cap. And now he stared into an endless ceiling of sky and leaves. I knew how wrong it was. My body stacked before my mind made up the right words to describe him. Death was something I had never come upon until then, but let me tell you, I knew it when I saw it.

Death was him. Staring into the ragged confinement of leaves. I put the cap back on his face. Then I left him, stepping over him. I went and sat in my playhouse to think.

I kept my eyes on him. After I put his cap back on his face he seemed asleep again. I sat there for a whole afternoon. He never moved. He never woke. He never seemed to know the passage of time.

So after a while, I knew that he was mine.

I never told anybody else he was there. He was the best thing I’d ever discovered. I went back to visit him the next morning while the dew was still wet on his clothes. I took the cap off his face and I saw how his eyes had changed, clouded like marbles. I touched the middle of his eye with the tip of a blade of grass, and he never blinked. It still surprised me, but I was less and less afraid. It seemed to me that he had come to my secret place for some reason. As young girls are, I was no different. I was curious.

Well maybe I was more curious than most.

He was so desperate poor that his clothing was nearly ripped off his body. The day went by. I cleaned up my house and then I cooked.

Acorns, beetles, patty dirt. I made some kind of food that was even deader than him and put a spoonful between his lips.

He had a strange jagged mouth. It was slightly open, as though it froze in the middle of an unspellable word.

It was just that time of summer before school starts, before the leaves turn yellow and fall off overnight, before I would have to get on the government bus and go off to boarding school. Some children never did come home, I’d heard. It was ‘just that time of summer when your life smarts and itches. When even your clothing hurts.

That’s why I did it. That’s why I did the worst.

Holes, dirt, with nothing but an old red scarf for a pants belt.

That was all he had on anyway. At first the cold hard stone of him surprised me. I only grazed him by accident. I did not really want to touch. I untied the knotted scarf, and his pants fell open from the waist. It was so easy I ‘jumped backward. His pants were worn and rotted. I can’t remember what I saw, or even how long I stayed. But soon after that the leaves came off the trees in yellow drifts, and every time I got close to my secret house a wall of smell rose up. I veered away. Then I went down to school on the government bus.

It was on that bus that Lulu Lamartine cried all the tears she would ever cry in her life. I don’t know why, but after that they just dried up.

Everyone who knows me will say I am a happy person. I go through life like a breeze. I try to greet the world without a grudge. I can beat the devil himself at cards because I play for the sheer amusement.

I never worry half as much as other people.

Things pass by. I suppose that Kashpaw was the one exception in my life.

I clung to him like no other. I wanted to get the best of him.

And I did. But for a time it seemed he had me over the barrel of his love. He came sneaking in my house with bad smells on his hands, and I made him wash before he touched me. But when he smelled like my lilac bath soap it would be blackness, deep blackness, and feathered insects with ruby eyes that watched us calmly in the dark. Nobody else ever knew of us. Nobody, if they don’t read this, ever will. We were that cautious. He had a wife who lost a boy and girl in fever, then took on too many children for anyone to count.

It went on for five years like that, until well after my youngest boy was born. Half Kashpaw. No wonder Lyman had money sense. Perhaps it would have gone like that for countless years more. I didn’t want more than I could get, I was pretty well content. But then the politician showed his true stripe, a Mywhite, and the love knot we had welded between us unbent.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement.

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don’t try, just let it in. I don’t believe in numbering God’s creatures. I never let the United States census in my door, even though they say it’s good for Indians. Well, quote me. I say that every time they counted us they knew the precise number to get rid of.

I believed this way even before those yellow-bearded Chinooks in their tie boots came to measure the land around Henry’s house. Henry Lamartine had never filed on or bought the land outright, but he lived there. He never took much stock in measurement, either. He knew like I did. If we’re going to measure land, let’s measure right. Every foot and inch you’re standing on, even if it’s on the top of the highest skyscraper, belongs to the Indians. That’s the real truth of the matter.

Of course, since when were higher-ups interested in the truth?

boom,-, One morning bright and early we got a regulation on our doorstep. It was signed with Kashpaw’s hand as representing the tribal government. In turn, that was the red-apple court representing Uncle Sam.

Kashpaw knocked that night.

“Lulu, ” he said, “it don’t mean nothing. just let me in.”

I stopped my ears and sicced the dogs on him. I was done with his lying hands.

I was the blood that pounded in his temples. I was the knock of his heart. I was the needle of desire. I worked my way through his body and sewed him up. Yet he was willing to turn me from my house.

Oh, they said they’d move it. Sure they did. How many times did we move? The Chippewas had started off way on the other side of the five great lakes. How we were shoved out on this lonesome knob of prairie my grandmother used to tell. It is too long a story to get into now.

Let’s just say that I refused to move one foot farther west. I was very much intent to stay where I was.

Around that time Henry’s brother, Beverly, appeared out of nowhere.

He wanted to get married. “I been waiting for you all these years,” he said. I believed no such thing, but he seemed so lost and dazed it was as if he had been sleepwalking through his life up until the time he fell back into my arms. I had a fond spot in my heart for Beverly. He was a smooth, mild man, and I thought he wouldn’t give me any trouble once I had him. I told Kashpaw about the marriage the next time I saw him in town, as though it were nothing to him.

“I’m tying the knot again. You know Bev Lamartine, from the Cities?”

Well Nector’s long face went longer. His eyes went blacker.

And what I saw in their hate pits made me cross my breast before I turned away. A love so strong brews the same strength of hate.

“I’ll kill him,” the eyes said. “Or else I’ll kill you.”

I thought his passion would die down. We never do one-half the things we threaten. But that was my mistaken judgment, for I hadn’t reckoned on the tribal mob.

Indian against Indian, that’s how the government’s money offer made us act. Here was the government Indians ordering their own people off the land of their forefathers to build a modern factory To make it worse, it was a factory that made equipment of false value. Keepsake things like bangle beads and plastic war clubs. A load of foolishness, that was.

Dreamstuff. I used that word in the speech when I stood up to the tribal council. I came before them. Kashpaw recognized me.

“Mrs. Lamartine has the floor,” he said.

“She’s had the floor and half the council on it,” I heard a whispered voice say. But I paid no heed and kept my head up proud.

I spoke. I looked deep through Nector Kashpaw and let my voice rove through the postcard Indian handsomeness of his personal dream stuff

Sweat had darkened patches on his workshirt beneath the arms. Perhaps he feared that I would tell how each night I made him wash his hands before he touched me, or what the insects saw us do with their blood-red eyes.

It was the stuff of dreams, I said. The cheap false longing that makes your money-grubbing tongues hang out. The United States government throws crumbs on the floor, and you go down so far to lick up those dollars that you turn your own people off the land. I got mad. “What’s that but merde?” I yelled at them.

“False value!” I said to them that this tomahawk factory mocked us all.

“She dyes her hair,” I heard a voice behind me whisper. “Gray at the roots.”

“The Lamartines lived all their life on that land,” I said. “The Lamartine family deserves to stay.”

A voice clapped itself over the mouth. But not before I heard it “Bitch!” By then there were near a hundred people in the cry, I room.

“All those Lamartine sons by different fathers.” That voice was loud enough to be heard. And then it said: “Ain’t the youngest Nector’s?” So I had no choice in what I did. I turned around.

I looked straight out at the people sitting in their unfolded chairs.

There was many a man who found something to study on the floor.

“I’ll name all of them,” I offered in a very soft voice. “The fathers I’ll point them out for you right here.”

There was silence, in which a motion was made from the floor.

“Restitution for Lamartine,” they said. “Monetary settlement.”

Relief blew through the room, but I would have none of it.

“We don’t want money,” I said. “We’re staying on our land.”

Every one of them could see it in my face. They saw me clear.

Before I’d move the Lamartine household I’d hit the tribe with a fistful of paternity suits that would make their heads spin. Some of them had forgotten until then that I’d even had their son. Still others must have wondered. I could see the back neck hair on the wives all over that room prickle. So it was. Eventually the meeting broke up. But to where? For it was soon after that Henry’s house burnt down.

I wish that Bev had gotten back from Minneapolis and stopped Kashpaw.

Here was the strange thing. Bev and me were married by a judge in the presence of the boys. Then a week later he told me he already had a wife. I put my foot down, of course. I can be a hard woman when I’m pressed. I told him to go-back there and get a divorce. I sent Gerry, my grownup baby tough as nails, in the car with him to the Cities in order to make certain that he dumped her. Whoever she was, I needed Bev worse.

Neither Bev nor Gerry came back for a long time. Bev had liked the idea of Gerry going along with him, but got more than bnxz; dp+ +;-.

A ” in’detenrlon, aa to’W111,’, day I think that Bev turned him in. I wasn’t too worried over that, however, since no white man has made a j’all that could hold the son of Old Man Pillager.

That’s one father’s name I gave away now, free. But of course Pillager was not sitting in the council room that night. And if he’d known about the fire, he would have scorched Kashpaw’s hands with it.

How do I know? How can I say it was Kashpaw who lit my house?

I can say so because of what I saw in his eyes when I looked deeply through him, after I told him about my marriage on the street like he was just any passing acquaintance. My house was burning in his eyes, and I was trapped there, alone, on fire with my own fire. The red-eyed moths had come out of the trees where they hid themselves, looking exactly like dead leaves.

Drawn by the bright flames, they’d come helplessly to burn.

That fated night the boys, all except for the youngest, Lyman, were off in town hanging at the outskirts of a large jackpot bingo.

I left Lyman home just for a moment and went down across the road to Florentine’s house to trade some commodity rice she had extra and would give me in exchange for cigarettes and powdered eggs. We had a cup of coffee while I was there. We talked of this and that. It was the chance they were watching my house to take.

When she poured the second cup I saw the flames shooting out of the black liquid as it streamed from the pot. I got up and left without saying good-bye. To this day she tells how Lamartine saw her house was burning in the pour of her coffee.

She doesn’t know I saw it first in Kashpaw’s eyes.

She doesn’t know what I saw when I got in eyeshot of my yard.

Smoke had unrolled from the windows and wrapped itself into a giant tube that fled straight toward heaven in that cloudless, windless dusk.

I threw rice in the air like a hundred weddings and took to my heels.

Already voices had stopped behind me, shouting on the road. I ran in a beeline wasting no breath, no time. I’d left Lyman sleeping in that house with the radio going in his ear.

I ran straight in the door.

Of course I choked. I got down on my hands and knees, crawling like a toddler baby in and out the rooms under burdensome heat. Smoke. The roof was ‘just about to cave and Lyman wasn’t nowhere to be found. Yet a mother’s heart was certain that her son was in the house. I stopped underneath my table to get my bearings, and then I knew. Sometimes he would go inside my private closet and lay against my clothes and shoes.

He liked the dark of it, I guess. The woman smells of cloth and perfumes.

Sometimes after I’d come home he would be sleeping on my closet floor.

I crawled in there. He was nuzzled in my nightgowns, overcome. I guess I heaved him out the bedroom window and fell after him into the hollyhocks. The tribal fire trucks were all broken down at the time.

That was their plan.

And so, after all of us were safe, there was nothing to do but stand and watch it burn.

How come we’ve got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud. I’ll get past the ragged leaves that dead burn of my youth looked into. I’ll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

After the house burnt to blackened sticks they came around. My people.

“Lamartine,” they said. “Poor Lulu. Come stay with us, Will you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to live right here.”

And I did live on the very spot where the house had stood. For two months we camped there in a shack made out of bent sheets of tin siding, busted boards, burnt wood. We hauled water in cans. The summer was dry and hot. In the hulks of our busted down cars my boys slept comfortably and well. People brought us food and beer. The Sisters gave us clothes. But we lived there like a pack of wild animals, and after a while it became a disgrace even to those who did not know the meaning of disgrace. The tribe finally built a cracker box government house for us.

They put it on a strip of land rightfully repurchased from a white farmer. That land was better than Henry’s, even, with a view overlooking town. From there I could see everything.

I accepted their restitution.

Time went fleetingly by until every one of my boys was a grownup man.

Some did me grief, though I was proud of them. Gerry was one. In and out of prison, yet inspiring the Indian people, that was his life.

Like myself he could not hold his wildness in.

The other one who went wild on me was unexpected. That was Henry junior. All his life he did things right, and then the war showed him right was wrong. Something broke in him. His mind gave way. He was past all touch when he returned. I would catch his gaze sometimes and think I recognized it from somewhere.

One day I knew. He had the same dead wide stare as the man in my playhouse. It did not surprise me so much, then, to hear the words on Lyman’s mouth the day he hitchhiked from the river.

“It was an accident,” Lyman said, coming in the door. He looked half gone himself. I threw an afghan on his shoulders.

“Don’t say nothing.” I led him over to a chair. He sat in shock.

“The car went in,” he said. “Out of control.” There was a false note in his voice, and I knew he had planned to say this. I also knew that no accident would have taken Henry junior’s life, not after he had the fortune to get through a war and a prison camp alive.

But like the time they came to tell me the news of Henry Senior, I said nothing. I knew what people needed to believe.

For a while after Henry junior died, Lyman was affected. He had always been carefree, a lover of nice things and ironed clothes like myself, with the golden touch for money from his father. He got morose. He could not snap out of it but slowly improved his outlook by working. He became a contractor, hired on his brothers, and in that way supported us all.

And so we stuck together on that strip of land that was once sun beat and bare of trees. Wives and children, in-laws, cousins, all collected there in trailers and more old car hulks. Box elder trees and oak scrub were planted and grew up. We even had a gooseberry patch. It became a regular nest of Lamartines. I’d had my first daughter, my last child, when I was almost fifty years old.

Bonita’s father was a Mexican who followed the sugar beet harvests.

That’s why her name was a little different. Our life went on. We saw the factory go up and then fall as it was meant to.

Nobody cared whose land it stood on anymore. Even the biggest problems got long lost in time, careful time, that undid us all, like Kashpaw’s hands with their flowered lies.

When I was over sixty-five and losing my sight, I had strings pulled to get a little two-room at the Senior Citizens. For years I’d just had the junk other people pawned off on me. Bouquets of plastic flowers that looked like they’d faded over graves, dishes of stained green plastic, clothes that went two for a quarter in the Bundles. I threw it all out and started over fresh. My apartment — had painted block walls.

I bought pictures of trees, dancers, wolves, and John Kennedy. I bought the classic called Plunge of the Brave, which everyone had whether they liked Kashpaw and wanted to venerate his youth, or did not like him and therefore made fun of his naked leap.

My boys went in together and bought me furniture. A match law ing set.

And then, after my new plush rocker was set in the middle of the room, after they brought in my radio and straightened the place around, after my boys toasted me with beers and left for the Lamartine homesite once more, I sat there. I felt the liquid golden last days of my oats.

And that is where the second half of this story starts.

I had nothing to do with the fact that Nector Kashpaw went foolish.

He had brains and heart to spare but never had to use them for himself He never fought. So when his senses started slipping he just let them dribble out. At least that’s the way I look at it, knowing him as I did.

I kept my grudge, although hard feelings were not as a rule my policy.

But he’d done the worst that anyone had ever done to me.

I could do without my hair, without my house. My pride was what he pricked. Perhaps my grudge against Nector reached the size it did because I never spread the bad feeling around. Nobody would have guessed.

I knew he was at the Senior Citizens, but I hadn’t yet seen him or his wife, Marie, on the morning I went walking those halls. As it turned out I just about ran into him. My vision was so bad I only saw dim shapes or holes of space, and when I walked past the candy machine I thought that he was attached to it. But the less I saw the more I had developed my other senses, so I felt what I knew were a man’s eyes upon me before I could tell where he was.

I turned toward the gaze and saw the shape I knew was Kashpaw, even though the outline of him was vague, cracked and shifting.

“Hello Nector,” I said.

And now I heard h;s breath. He said no word.

“It’s me. Lulu,” I told him. “Have I changed so much?”

He repeated my name flatly as he would have said doorknob.

Then he turned to the candy machine and gave it a hard shove. I heard, the little paper packages in the slots whisk back and rustle.

A strange complicated hesitation swept over me. Part of me wanted to walk away. People had told me that he was changed, but I guess I had not believed it. Now it was one way or the other.

He was here. As much as I wanted to leave I also wanted to stay and put my arms around him, simply, in the broad daylight of our old age.

He shoved the tin box again then struck it with the flat of his hand.

The way he gulped he could have been crying.

“Sometimes they just take your money,” I said.

“Peanut butter cups. ” He turned from the machine’s lit face. “I wanted a pack of them peanut butter cups,” he said. And I realized that bit of candy was all he had in his mind. I was less than a chair or an old shoe to NeCtOr.

Wasn’t that just like him? People said Nector Kashpaw had changed, but the truth was he’d just become more like himself than ever. I left him mourning at the window of the glowing machine, staring at the array in a child’s billow of frustration. It was too soon to tell what I felt for him. I suppose I felt sorry for what a greedy thing he’d been all along, and how it showed now.

But I didn’t go back and give him a quarter. I still cared enough about him not to do that.

Now as I said, his wife, Marie, also lived in the home. It might seem odd I never spoke of her yet, but really it’s not. I never wanted to admit the existence of wives, you see, and they were just as anxious not to realize about Lulu I.Amartine. If we could have snapped our fingers to get rid of each other we would have done that. But since we couldn’t, we did the next best and ignored. That’s not to say I didn’t notice her. She was big and slightly hunched with bad legs. On hot days I guess it hurt her very much to move.

Marie was always good at taking care of things, and once she got to Senior Citizens she started right in with organizing pinochle nights.

Sometimes I played cards with a magnifying glass and sometimes I ‘just played by feel and what I could hear. My ears had seemed to grow]like radar. That was how I heard my name come up in conversation under bids on the far side of the room.

“Standing by the candy machine with Lulu the other day.

I heard a voice tell another. Who? I had a feeling it was Marie.

And sure enough I heard another voice I recognized as hers an’He’s like a child now. He’s just got to have his candy come swer. I I what might.”

I understood it was the nature of his disease Marie was talking about, and not the times Kashpaw came in my window. But it might as well have been that. The way it hit me she was correct.

He always did have to have his candy come what might and whether Lulu or Marie was damaged by his taking it. All that mattered was his greed.

And the odd thing was, I loved him for it.

We were two of a kind. There is no getting around that. We took our pleasure without asking or thinking further than a touch. We were so deeply sunk in the land of our greed it took the court action of the tribe and a house on fire to pull us out.

Hearing her voice I tried imagining what Marie must have thought. He came each week in the middle of the night. She must have known he wasn’t out taking walks to see the beauty of the dark heaven. I wondered. Of course, there was no way I could ask her. It was probably too late, after the fact and all, to get to know her. I thought of joining one of the entertainment or health committees she was on, but my nerve failed. And, besides, I was suffering worse from the eyesight every day, almost as how.-, if the longer I sat quiet in the Senior Citizens, reflecting on the human heart, the more inward turned my vision, until I was almost blind to the outside world.

Was it the blindness itself, so black it matched his lifelong greed?

Was it the true remaining desire of my wants? Or was what happened just plain stupidity?

One day I was cutting back rhubarb in the courtyard when he came up behind me with a stick in his hand. I knew, as if by instinct, it was one of those dandelion diggers, forked like his tongue.

“Don’t bother me,” I said, walking back in the building. He followed. I had a load in the laundry room to check. He stepped into the room behind me, and then he shut the door. I turned to him, silent.

“Lulu, call the dogs off,” he said.

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

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

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

Dreamstuff. It was all I needed at this time.

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

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

I should have known that.

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

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

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

“Where did you hear about me and Kashpaw?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But the truth is I have no regrets.”

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

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

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

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

We fell to hearing the music again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s busted out again. I’m sunk.”

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

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

His mother screamed.

“What about us? What about us?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had never thought about it.

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

After that he was Howard at school.

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

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

“Good,” said Howard.

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

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

Howard was living in this body like a house.

Howard Kashpaw.

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

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

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

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

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

“Stillwater Pen?”

“Fuck that for now. I was in Nam.”

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

“How he does blab on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Lamartine.

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

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

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

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

What about Germaine? She told Germaine to quit hoarding commodity flour and give it away because there was worms in it.

How do you figure?

Insight. It was as though Lulu knew by looking at you what was the true bare-bone elements of your life. It wasn’t like that before she had the operation on her eyes, but once the bandages come off she saw.

She saw too clear for comfort.

Only Grandma Kashpaw wasn’t one trifle out of current at the insight Lulu showed. She and Lulu was thick as thieves now.

That too was odd. If you’ll just picture them together knowing everybody’s life, as if they had hot lines to everybody’s private thoughts, you’ll know why people started rushing past their doors.

They feared one of them would reach out, grab them into their room, and tell them all the secrets they tried to hide from themselves.

Which is of course just what happened to Lipsha Morrissey.

Lulu grabbed me.

She might be soft and sweet as marshmallows, but in her biceps there was tension steel. She had run her nails beneath my collar, and I was whisked in before I could draw breath to yell.

Clapped right down in her plastic armchair and scared to move for starting a fateful apartment-wide avalanche of sharp-edged ashtrays and painted poodles, I breathed a sigh. Caught but good, I thought. I wasn’t really scared so much as irritated to be treated so abrupt. I was sure I knew all my secrets, see, and hadn’t anything to hide.

But I was wrong. As soon as she’d said,

“I talked this over with your mother long ago,” I knew she was going to tell me something on which I’d shut the door.

And when she said,

“Not your stepmother, not Marie, but your mother in the flesh …” my worst thought was confirmed.

“I don’t want to hear,” I told Lulu flat out. “My real, mother’s Grandma Kashpaw. That’s how I consider her, and why not?

Seeing as my blood mother wanted to tie a rock around my neck and throw me in the slough.”

“that’s what you always been told,” said Lulu calmly.

“Been told?”

Sure enough, I was hooked then. I took her bait.

“What do you mean?”

So she up and spilled the beans.

“You’re nineteen years old now? That makes it twenty years ago this happened. My son Gerry-you know him, in Illinois doing time now-was just out of high school. One day he came home and told he how he’d got his eye set on this beautiful woman,

“She’s got a beautiful shape,” he said. “She has class.” He didn’t say that she was also very bold, or that she was already married, or even that she had a child. He didn’t tell me those facts! He just said,

“Mom I think I’ll marry her.” He presented me with it. The only drawback was she was what you’d call an older woman.

More experienced. But who cares past a certain point anyhows?

People talked, but those two went together and fell in love. Well, the inevitable happened pretty soon. That pretty woman started wearing a big wide tent dress. My boy left. Then I don’t know what happened between them, because, not long after, a little baby was placed in your Grandma Kashpaw’s arms. The woman went back to her husband, Gordie Kashpaw. As you know, they did not live very happily ever after.

Neither did my Gerry. In fact, it looks like you had the best life of them all.”

I couldn’t take it in.

“You went and made this up for laughs,” I said. “I ain’t June Kashpaw’s son.”

“Her father was a Morrissey,” said Lulu, “figure that.”

So I figured. My head felt put on strange. A buzzing sound was starting in the room.

I looked at her, and all of a sudden here was the next odd thing: I saw that Lulu Lamartine and Lipsha Morrissey had the same nose. Hers was little, semi-squashed in, straight and flat. Mine was a bigger, flatter version of hers down to the squashed-in tip. It was like seeing something in a mirror that’s not your face.

- “I’m scared to death of you,” I said. “Old witch, you tell me lies!”

“You spoilt child, ” she said. “Who else would you want to hear it from? They all know. Grandma Kashpaw, she’s afraid to tell you because she loves you like a son. It frightens her to think you might run off.

June’s dead. My son Gerry’s in the clink. Gordie’s drying out, but he wouldn’t tell you anyhow. They all know it though, all of them Kashpaws. What the heck is it anyway? Do you like being the only one that’s ignorant?”

“No,” I said.

She softened. Her hard little black eyes toned down and misted.

That black crow feather duster on her head seemed to fold its wings and settle.

“I got a letter,” she said, then she smiled. “Your dad Gerry’s — odd been so good they’re going to transfer him back to the state pen.

There ain’t a prison that can hold the son of Old Man Pillager, a Nanapush man. You should be proud that you’re one.

“I’m the only one that had nothing to lose by telling you all this,” she went on after a short pause. “It’s simple. I either gain a grandson or lose a young man who didn’t like me in the first place.”

I sat there in total quiet. She had caught me but good.

“Well,” she said after a while, “which is it?”

Consideration got me no place the next day and a half I thought at first I would pretend like nothing happened, and just go about my business.

But as I walked here and there on the reservation, swept the bingo hall, cleaned up pop-tops in the playground, I could not help but dwell on the subject of myself. Lipsha Morrissey, who’d learned so much in his short life. Who had lost and regained the touch. Lipsha Morrissey who was now on the verge of knowing who he was.

I was confused.

Had my mother tried to sling me in the marsh? I went back to Lulu and asked.

“No,” she said. “June was ‘just real upset about the whole thing.

Your Grandma Kashpaw took you on because the truth is she had a fond spot for June, just like she’s got one for you.

Besides that, Gordie couldn’t handle another man’s son. They’re all jealous of Gerry Nanapush on this reservation.”

I was still confused.

Had June mentioned me at all in the time I was growing up?

“Yes,” said Lulu. “She watched you from a distance, and hoped you would forgive her some day. She wondered why you turned out odd.”

“I turned out odd?”

“Well I never thought you was odd,” she said. “Just troubled.

You never knew who you were. That’s one reason why I told you.

I thought it was a knowledge that could make or break you.”

Again I sat there in total silence.

“Well,” she said, “make or break?”

I didn’t know. I was still trying to compass it all out. It was the tax ingest problem my brain had ever had to work with. I know that Grandma Kashpaw tried to give me help. She used up her cans of commodity beef to keep my strength up. She fought Old Lady Blue at the mission bundle sales to acquire a Stetson practically new except for a burnt hole through the crown. One night she said that she didn’t trust the banks no more and showed me where she’d stuck her money. She had it all tied up in a little pink hankie and stuck amid her underskirts.

“I’m an old woman,” she said. “What do I need with this?”

Maybe I was mis constructing but the more I thought about the way she looked at me when she said that, the more I felt like Grandma was offering me something. Bus fare, maybe, the chance to get away from here in my confusion. Whatever it was she really meant, I finally did the wicked act you might have already been expecting.

I stole into Grandma Kashpaw’s apartment and sneaked the hankie full of money from her drawer.

As my hand was feeling for that hankie, I heard her breathing in the dark bed, pretending to be asleep. I was doing what she was afraid of and running away. More than anything I wanted to say I’d get back as soon as I could, reassure her somehow, but I couldn’t. My throat choked up.

What could a sneak thief have to say anyhow? I thought.

I was drove to this crime by mass confusion. My soul was going to get whaled on for sure, if it was not already damned. As I walked out of that room, I justified. I justified my criminal act by being so unhappy I could die of it. Confusion. It was a bleak sadness sweeping through my brain. Sirens blowing. Random anger, which had never been my style before.

More than anything, I resented how they all had known.

So that’s all there was to it, pretty much. I rode the bus across the missile bases and the sunflower fields until I came to our most popular border town, and then shame hit but good. Shame rolled over me in waves and a tidal wash. I was buried in it like a sink hold I took a room in a hotel for old veterans and, like them, I spent my daylight sifting in the window drinking 3.2 beer and my nights in the lobby watching cop shows. Shame had me by the neck. But at last, when it had played out to squirts and dribbles, I was able to look around me.

I was able to walk the streets like the younger derelicts.

I walked back and forth then, all day, only vaguely curious about what I would do next. As I walked, I kept returning to one particular window.

In it was the pictures of some clean-cut boys with monkey wrenches standing among a bank of red flowers.

There was a caption. It said:

JOIN TODAY’S ACTION ARMY

Eventually, I walked into the office behind those grinning boys. Two shakes later, before I had thought twice, I was signing my name on a wad of paper.

, After I had signed up for my monkey wrench and red flower, I went back to the hotel and watched Efrem Zimbalist junior persecute some drug addicts. I happened to take a close look around me at one point, and then I realized something. I realized that if I went in the army, and then if I got lucky enough to come out, I would be a veteran like these guys-gumming the stubble on their chins, dreaming of long-hocked medals, curling up around their secret war wounds to comfort a lonesome night.

Not much You never knew who you were. That’s one reason why I told you.

I thought it was a knowledge that could make or break you.”

Again I sat there in total silence.

“Well,” she said, “make or break?”

I didn’t know. I was still trying to compass it all out. It was the tax ingest problem my brain had ever had to work with. I know that Grandma Kashpaw tried to give me help. She used up her cans of commodity beef to keep my strength up. She fought Old Lady Blue at the mission bundle sales to acquire a Stetson practically new except for a burnt hole through the crown. One night she said that she didn’t trust the banks no more and showed me where she’d stuck her money. She had it all tied up in a little pink hankie and stuck amid her underskirts.

“I’m an old woman,” she said. “What do I need with this?”

Maybe I was mis constructing but the more I thought about the way she looked at me when she said that, the more I felt like Grandma was offering me something. Bus fare, maybe, the chance to get away from here in my confusion. Whatever it was she really meant, I finally did the wicked act you might have already been expecting.

I stole into Grandma Kashpaw’s apartment and sneaked the hankie full of money from her drawer.

As my hand was feeling for that hankie, I heard her breathing in the dark bed, pretending to be asleep. I was doing what she was afraid of and running away. More than anything I wanted to say I’d get back as soon as I could, reassure her somehow, but I couldn’t. My throat choked up.

What could a sneak thief have to say anyhow? I thought.

I was drove to this crime by mass confusion. My soul was going to get whaled on for sure, if it was not already damned. As I walked out of that room, I justified. I justified my criminal act by being so unhappy I could die of it. Confusion. It was a bleak sadness sweeping through my brain. Sirens blowing. Random anger, which had never been my style before.

More than anything, I resented how they all had known.

So that’s all there was to it, pretty much. I rode the bus across the missile bases and the sunflower fields until I came to our most popular border town, and then shame hit but good. Shame rolled over me in waves and a tidal wash. I was buried in it like a sink hold I took a room in a hotel for old veterans and, like them, I spent my daylight sitting in the window drinking 3.2 beer and my nights in the lobby watching cop shows. Shame had me by the neck. But at last, when it had played out to squirts and dribbles, I was able to look around me.

I was able to walk the streets like the younger derelicts.

I walked back and forth then, all day, only vaguely curious about what I would do next. As I walked, I kept returning to one particular window.

In it was the pictures of some clean-cut boys with monkey wrenches standing among a bank of red flowers.

There was a caption. It said:

JOIN TODAY’S ACTION ARMY

Eventually, I walked into the office behind those grinning boys. Two shakes later, before I had thought twice, I was signing my name on a wad of paper.

I After I had signed up for my monkey wrench and red flower, I went back to the hotel and watched Efrem Zimbalist junior persecute some drug addicts. I happened to take a close look around me at one point, and then I realized something. I realized that if I went in the army, and then if I got lucky enough to come out, I would be a veteran like these guys-gumming the stubble on their chins, dreaming of long-hocked medals, curling up around their secret war wounds to comfort a lonesome night.

Not much in that, less than nothing. It gave me a sick chill to think of ending up here, like foam th rowed off the waves of the lake, spin drift, all warped and cracked like junk and left to rot.

This here was yesterday’s action army, I thought.

Fear clenched down. If I wanted to evade the consequences, I was going to have to hightail it and run.

But where to? That was my problem. I couldn’t bear going back home to the rez, where every damn Kashpaw cousin knew the secret of my background all those years. I was too galled. And yet I really didn’t have nowhere else. There was no clear direction to follow, nothing to send me anywhere, until, as in this sort of case, I decided to ask myself point-blank what exactly I wanted.

The answer came quick and surprising.

“I want to meet my dad,” I said aloud.

An old Sioux vet who said he was at Iwo Jima with Ira Hayes passed me a bagged flask of whiskey underneath the sign PLEASE DON’T DRINK HERE.

THIS is YOUR LOBBY. I took a long pull, slugged it down. Then I started crying. That is, tears came out. I made no sound.

“it often has that effect on me too, boy,” the old man said. “It cleans you out.”

So I let the tears fall, my hands shredding the bag, until the face of Old Grand Dad was revealed and the clerk told us to take it outside.

By then I was half smashed. Everything seemed to hang in a sharp-edged silence. It was there, before the peeled, kicked-up doorway of the Rudolph Hotel that I got the word on what I should do.

“Ira’s favorite brand,” said my friend, gazing tenderly at the empty bottle. “What the hell.”

As he walked away he threw it over his shoulder, and it hit me smack between the eyes.

Now as you know, as I have told you, I am sometimes blessed with the talent to touch the sick and heal their individual problems without even knowing what they are. I have some powers which, now that I think of it, was likely come down from Old Man Pillager.

And then there is the newfound fact of insight I inherited from Lulu, as well as the familiar teachings of Grandma Kashpaw on visioning what comes to pass within a lump of tinfoil.

It was all these connecting threads of power, you see, that gave me the flash of vision when I was knocked in the skull by Ira’s favorite brand.

No concrete shit barn prison’s built that can hold a Chippewa, I thought.

And I realized instantly that was a direct, locally known quote of my father, Gerry Nanapush, famous politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert, escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement, and smoker of many pipes of kinnikinnick in the most radical groups.

That was … Dad.

According to my vision, he would make a break for freedom soon.

So that is how I got to the Twin Cities. After I got off the Greyhound I just started following the Indians whenever I saw one, and eventually ended up where I belonged. Now I was sitting across from King.

Let’s get one thing straight: I never had much use for King. He did me dirt. Yet we know there were reasons to visit him. For one thing, I just had to see him knowing what I knew. Maybe things would change now that we were formally brothers. The other thing was that King had done time with Gerry Nanapush. I didn’t think King knew Gerry was my father, but I knew there was some connection, a strong connection.” maybe strong enough to lead me onward in my quest. I had to get down to the bottom of my heritage.

now-&AMM King once threatened to slice me up with a bread knife. I didn’t bold that against him, since it was done during one of his frequent leaves of sense, but what I did hold against him was the manner he always took toward me.

“You little orphant,” he’d say when we were young. “Who said you get a pork chop for dinner? That’s for the real children.” Or he’d steal my chunk of Spam. It didn’t matter what we were having, he’d steal mine for the sheer spite,

“I’ll thank you, hand over your Koolaid too,” he’d say. “Only the real children get that.”

And so forth, on and on. He did his best to make me feel like a beggar at the table of life. I was supposed to cat the real children’s crumbs.

He lorded over me until I got about his size and really let fly once.

I’m not a regular strong guy, but push me too far and I might just go haywire. Punching and rolling, biting and kicking, I tore into him. He still beat me that time, but at least King learned I was no fun to tangle with. I wonder now why I never made sense of what happened after that. June ran out of the house and broke us up. And then, even though I was the one on the bottom, she beat my britches with uncommon vigor. I hadn’t done King lasting harm. But I guess I had done her some.

King must have been ten years old when I punched his face.

Since that time we’d come on the verge of blows, but he never harassed me the way he used to do at the table, and I in turn stayed out of his path as much as possible.

Now you know, when it comes to life, I stayed innocent for many years. I stayed simple. But I could not afford to be this anymore. I was on the run. I looked over at him sitting across the table. He was still King who had hounded me with dim conceptions. But he had changed. His bones had sunk back in his flesh.

The booze was telling on him. Wear and tear of being mean had worn his temper so it balanced on a sliver. His eyes had a strange mocking glint.

how.-,

“Have some pop, Sad Sack,” he said, shoving

“Just ing me a can.

kidding. Haw. Today I’m on the wagon, ain’t that right?”

“I guess you better be,” said Lynette. Her lip was puffed up.

She had a surly look about her. Maybe they were fighting or maybe it was the deranging effects of this apartment. I had never seen a place remotely so depressing; even the inside of the Rudolph at least had windows. This place was like a long dark closet. The narrow rooms was laid in a row. The air was smoky and thick. The walls was a most disturbing shade of mustard green. One side you could hear people trampling up and down the hall, while the other led out into a dim-lighted area. This was not outdoors, but a well with spooky gray light from the dirty skylight on the roof I should mention, however, there was a couple attempts at doing something to reclaim this twilight zone.

A corn plant In a flour bucket sagged like a drunk propped up a wall.

One chubby t cactus, a fist in a glass, threatened you to touch it.

There was the skin of a real live alligator nailed on the closet door.

In the next room, over the television set, they had one of them velvet rugs that depict bulldogs playing cards.

I had gone to check the next room out.

“This here’s nice,” I said to Little King. The boy was glaring at

TV.

He didn’t so much as look at me.

“Little King,” I said. “Hey there, it’s me.”

“The don’t call himself Little King anymore,” Lynette said from the kitchen. “He thinks his name’s Howard.”

“Howard?”

The boy looked at me and nodded.

“He won’t claim his dad no more,” said King, standing in the doorway.

“He’s too good.”

Which was true enough. You could see how smart that Howard was. The boy’s black eyes had fairly swallowed me up in their short glance. He was a skinny little kid, with pea kish hair the light brown color that Lynette’s was when it had been natural.

The contrast between his light coloring and those deep black eyes was what made him so startling to look at. He turned back to the set.

His face light up for a moment, captured in the drama of old cartoon Coyote getting blown to bits for the fifty-millionth time by the Road Runner.

“Man that was decent,” he said in a false little squeaky voice.

They showed the coyote all blasted and frayed.

I always thought, personally, the coyote deserved to roast that chipper bird on a spit.

“I feel sorry for old Wiley Coyote,” I said.

The kid looked at me like I was a sad case.

“That don’t matter,” he said. “They still blow him up.”

Or run him over with garbage trucks. That’s what they did next.

When he was flat as a pancake someone rolled him in a tube and mailed him C. 0. D. to Tijuana.

It was just early evening, a typical Sunday night for the King Kasbpaw family. I decided to put them out for dinner at the very least. I’d get paid back for the pork chops and Koolaid King had screwed me out of as a child. I could see my presence was not exactly welcome to them, however. They seemed to have something weighty on their minds. They kept sighing and looking out their windows, which led down the air shaft. No one appreciated me asking Lynette whether I could help with dinner. She hadn’t actually looked like she was going to fix any. She sat back at the kitchen table, flicked her little red lighter, and blasted a ball of smoke in the air.

“I’m on strike,” she said. “Tonight I’m improving my mind.”

Across the table, King closed his eyes and popped a 7-Up.

“She thinks that’s funny,” he said, “which it is.”

She had a long blue sweater on and a blouse that looked. as if it was ripped whole from a shower curtain. There were magazines behind her in a cardboard box. She grabbed up a fistful of pages JAN.

how.-, and went in to sit by the television. Me and King tipped back the 7-Ups.

Pretty soon the boy came in and opened the refrigerator. He took out a carton of milk and put it on the cupboard. Then he got himself a bowl and spoon. He poured the bowl full of milk. Then he reached under the sink and took out a box of cereal.

“He does it all backwards,” observed King. “First he should put the cereal in his bowl, then the milk.”

Howard didn’t say nothing. He carried the bowl and the box of cereal very carefully in to the television. It was like he was going to make a religious offering. He and his mother would be huddled to the box, sitting there like cold spooks. I almost laughed. I was so tired from the bus that my mind was running wild. I asked,

“Do you ever think about that summer you came to stay with Grandma Kashpaw? When you were little?”

“Not too much.”

I wondered what the hell he did think about. And then I thought there was no harm in asking.

“Well what do you think about?” I asked.

You could have knocked me over with a straw at the way he started to answer that question. It was a big fat surprise, I’ll tell you, to know that King Kashpaw could do much more than growl, whine, throw his weight around. I guess being on the wagon brought him out or something.

“Minnows,” he said. “It’s like I’m always stuck with the goddamn minnows. Every time I work my way up-say I’m next in line for the promotion-they shaft me. It’s always something they got against me. I move on. Entry level. Stuck down at the bottom with the minnows.”

He grit his teeth, picked the warm can up in his hand, then crushed it softly so it gurgled.

“I’m gonna rise,” he said. “One day I’m gonna rise. They can’t keep down the Indians. Right on brother, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I couldn’t help it; the laugh behind my face was like a sneeze.

He’d called me brother.

“What’s so funny?”

“Don’t know.”

“My God,” he said. “You’d think the Indians that got up there would look out for their own! Once they start earning twenty-five, thirty grand they move off in a suburb and forget about their cousins. They look down on you. Hey. You ever heard of the food chain?”

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“You been smoking dope? Dopehead. Listen. The big fish eats the little fish and the little fish eats the littler fish. The one with the biggest mouth eats any darrin old fish he wants.”

I got up. They had another box of cereal under the counter.

Lucky Charms. I poured some milk in my bowl and then dumped the cereal in, like Howard.

“Yeah,” said King, “go ahead and eat anything you want. Like I was telling you, I was in the Marines. You can’t run from them bastards, man. They’ll get you every time. I was in Nam.”

That was a fat lie, but I sat there and listened. The cereal was sweet, good, like candy, and the milk was filling. I lapped it up. I had a desperate hungry craving. I kept pouring it in and feeding my face fast as I could. He hardly noticed. He was off into his own mind.

“BINH,” he popped his lips. “BINH, BINH.”

That was the sound of incoming fire exploding next to his head.

“Apple, Apple?”

“What Banana?”

“Over here, Apple!”

That was what he and his buddy, who King said was a Kentucky Boy, used to call each other, in code.

“How come you didn’t just use names?” I asked between gulps.

“What difference?”

“The enemy. ” He glared at me. He was getting into the fantasy.

“They’re a small people. ” He put his hand out at Howard’s height.

“Hard to see. ” I sat back. My whole middle was comfortably soaked in milk.

“That’s all right,” he said, waving my imaginary pleading off.

“Some other time. I don’t really like to talk about it.”

“All right,” I said. “I understand. Let’s play cards.”

Anything to get his mind off all that fun he had missed in Vietnam.

Anything not to think what might happen if the army caught up with me.

What they did with the Lipsha Morrissey type I didn’t want to ask. I ‘just knew I didn’t want to be a member of some fruit bowl in the jungle, not to mention of how they crazed your mind in training camp.

Not for me.

There was a pack of cards on the windowsill, that window looking down into the sad gray patch of space. I thought perhaps they should have closed it off. That shaft went through all the way to the ground floor.

You could hear ghostly doors slamming, voices in the entryway.

It was supposed to be elegant once, but now the soft and threafful dusk of it gave me the creeps.

Poker?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Five-card stud.

“Deuces wild.”

I like the deuce wild. I like that puny little card becoming strategy.

We started playing. The dark came sifting gently down, so we put the lights on. The place seemed almost cozy when there wasn’t any reason to have windows anyway. I was all full of milk and cereal like a good child. The meal had perked me up; Lynette made coffee, and although it tasted like dishwater run through a car battery, I sipped it gratefully.

If this evening around mat how.” the table, with King in a state of rare normality, was the most brotherly we’d ever get, I decided it was enough. One thing you’ll notice. I did not let on I knew that both our backgrounds were sprung from the same source. And I hadn’t asked about Gerry yet. I felt better keeping it to myself For the moment, I didn’t even care to flaunt that I belonged. Belonging was a matter of deciding to.

Through many trials I had seen this to be true. I decided I belonged, whether or not King thought I did. I was a real kid now, or halfway real. I crimped myself an ace.

I’d had to learn the knack of cheating at cards when I worked as an attendant at the Senior Citizens. Otherwise they’d beat your hide. It wasn’t cheating to them, anyway, just second nature. The games were cheerfully cutthroat vicious, and the meanest player of them all was Lulu. She’d learned to crimp, that is, to mark your cards with little scratches and folds as you play, when she started losing her eyesight.

It was just supposed to keep her even in the game, she said. I learned to crimp from her before I ever knew she was my grandmother, which might explain why I took to it with such enormous ease. The blood tells. I suppose there is a gene for crimping in your strings of cells.

At any rate, I was getting to know the cards pretty good. I always like to keep my eye on where my jacks are going in the deck, because other people like to call the one-eyed jacks wild. I got aS Oft Spot fDTthe ‘ack. The jack of hearts is me-who doesn’t hold a sword in his hand, but a banana peel.

I raised King a moon. We wasn’t playing for change but bits of cereal.

There wasn’t any change around and he was short on matches, so we used the marshmallow bits that came in the box.

Stars were a hundred dollars, hearts fifty, moons were twenty, and the diamond was ten. The pieces of cereal themselves was all worth one.

That’s how it went. Every so often we would munch a little from the pot, to keep us going.

He took me with a full, swept the marshmallows to his side, home.-, and threw them one by one in his mouth. We started over again.

In the next room there was some show on with lots of guns burping. I wondered how to bring up Gerry.

Again, I decided to take the bull by the teeth. King was dealing.

“So you knew Gerry Nanapush when you was both in Stillwater,” I said.

The cards spurted evenly from his hands. He didn’t miss one.

“Oh Gee,” he said with an awkward boasting laugh. “We were like this. ” He put the last of his cards down, and held up his first two fingers, clenched together.

“That is, we were buddies until those asshole Winnebagos started spreading rumors about me.”

“Oh?” I tried leading him. I was out of stars and betting hearts.

But he wasn’t going to get no further into that. I waited a little while before I tried anything else.

“Well is it true,” I said, “they have him in maximum security with the real big-time criminals?”

“Not that I heard,” King said, for sure now uncomfortable. “I heard he’s back in Mandan. It’s … not all that secure.”

King pouted his cheeks and pushed his moons over, I asked him if he thought Gerry had really killed that smokey or was it pinned on him the way so many people said after the trial.

“I really wouldn’t know,” was all King muttered.

I wished he would have told me, because that’s one thing I really wondered now that Gerry was my father. Had he really cut a living man down? I wanted to know what kind of seed I had sprung from. The television guns were chattering. We played in silence, and it came to me after a while that something was definitely wrong and agitating King.

A couple of times he blurted bits of a tuneless song as though he was keeping his mind from touching a sore subject. He lit his Marlboros one off the other’s end, and sometimes left two burning in an ashtray. He couldn’t have been so deeply absorbed in a game where the stakes was a bowl of cereal, so I had to wonder what was wrong. I had a clue it was related to my questioning him on Gerry. After that, I’d had trouble letting him win a single game.

Long about nine he got to really looking jumpy. He was wiping beads of sweat off his upper lip, biting on his thumb. Finally he got it out he wanted to go in the next room, catch the news. So we quit playing.

Lynette was curled up on the couch underneath an old coat, and the boy Howard was sitting rigid in the chair.

Newsbreak came on, sure enough, and that’s when I had my inkling of what was bothering King, what was strange here all along, maybe even why he was on the wagon.

He had to keep his wits about him.

The newscaster was talking. “Federal criminal Gerry Nanapush escaped while being transferred to the North Dakota State Penitentiary. He is believed to be at large in the tri-state region.

Nanapush is six feet, four inches and weighs three hundred and twenty pounds. He was last seen wearing a ripped black nylon jacket, jeans, and a pair of white leather running shoes with red stripes. Nanapush may be armed and should be considered dangerous. ” I whooped. “Treat with caution! Handle with care! Armed and dangerous Chippewa!”

I looked at King. “Can’t keep an Indian down!” I said. “Right on brother!”

That was when I noticed King and Lynette weren’t laughing or excited in the least. They said,

“Shut up,” in unison and turned back to the television. I was hardly bothered though. I couldn’t have cared less.

I only cared that I’d known that this was happening and now it was happening. All signs pointed to it.

For hours we sat as if paralyzed, there in the blue smoke wreaths and fissures of drifting dust. I was happy in the television radiance. They were not. All four of us were waiting, though, for what happened next.

I was listening past the shows, past the noise and jingles, as hard as I could. That is why I heard. I was not surprised. I heard it clear with my extra special sense. Down on the first floor a door shut softly. steps paused at the bottom of the skylight shaft. There was a delicate scrabbling of mice beneath the stars, and a foothold was suddenly gained. In my mind’s eye I saw him spring into the close air.

The copper pipes bowed outward in his hand.

The hot ones, wrapped in asbestos, ringed or joined every three feet, led up the inside of the dusk-filled hollow shaft. I didn’t have to look down the fake window in order to know he was climbing. I thought the whole building must have heard.

I thought so, but when I glanced over at King and Lynette they were still gazing slack-jawed into the ions like their futures was prefigured in the flashing shapes. They didn’t blink when he knocked an ashtray off the windowsill in the kitchen. They didn’t start when his tender footsteps slid along the warped floor. Only when he stood, enormous, gentle, completely blocking the silvery rays, only when he pointed his hand at them like a gun, did they stop drifting and bunch themselves in sense. Their shapes detached from the couch even as the boy’s shape flattened into the chair. I looked down at the man’s feet.

They glowed, mushroom pale in the dark. The cushioned jogging soles were so radiant and spongy he seemed to float softly toward us.

The famous Chippewa who had songs wrote for him, whose face was on protest buttons, whose fate was argued over in courts of law, who sent press releases to the world, sat down at the dirtiest kitchen table in Minnesota with his son and his cellmate, and picked up a deck of cards.

A marked deck.

For the marked men, which was all of us.

I was marked for pursuit by authority as was my father, but King was marked in another entire way. As Gerry explained in a quiet voice that had no business to issue from a bulk that could scarcely squeeze between the table and the wall, King was a squealer, an informer. He’d got Gerry’s confidence and then betrayed it.

“I’m trusting,” Gerry said to me, shaking his head, blinking his mild eyes, “especially of all my Indian relations. I confided to him all my plans to escape once, never knowing he was an apple. ” That is: red on the outside, white on the inside.

“Your friend here, this King Kashpaw, was the King of Stoolies. ” I looked at King. Here was a man you could call sick with one quick glance. His face was gray as lead, his eyes was darting side to side, his lips looked numb. He kept on licking them with dry clucking sounds.

Gerry had maneuvered things so King sat between us, hedged in, at the back of the wall behind the little pile of Lucky Charms.

“Why don’t you eat them,” he said to King. “You’ll need it.

“Luck of the Irish. See where it got them,” I said.

Gerry looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I’m Lipsha Morrissey.”

His slant black brows stayed up. His long hair was pulled back in a tail, and his thin black mustache hung down his lip, so that his teeth flashed out only when he grinned very broad. His grin flashed now, wolf white and sharp, in his big placid face. Until he grinned like that he looked asleep. Suddenly he tossed his hair back and bust out laughing.

He laughed a good long time. It was a loud joyful comforting sound to Lipsha Morrissey, but to King and Lynette it must have been harrowing.

The way he laughed, and then the slow method his eyes took me in by notches, when he was back to himself again, gave me reason to believe that he knew whose son he looked at.

I was certain, at any rate, that he was my dad. His nose was even bigger than mine, but squashed in the same places. It was his hands that had really tipped me off.

All the time he’d been talking, grinning, even laughing, they had the cards playing in and out of their fingers. They had a life all unto themselves that was spent in knowledge of the cards, and I knew just what gave them that knowledge. He had a form of the touch. Behind the bars, though, he hadn’t much chance to use it on humans. So his hands had poured their talents into understanding the decks. He cast his eyes down every once in a while, briefly, to see the face that his hands were memorizing. His fingers moved around the paper edges, found the nail nicks. His wolf smile glinted. There was a system to the crimping that he recognized. Those crimps were like a signature-his mother’s.

I’d only learned Lulu’s system, not restyled it.

“She taught me,” I said.

He only nodded, and his teeth showed again.

He looked at King, who was staring across the room. King’s eyes were locked with Lynette’s, and hers were paralyzed. She was squeezing Howard on the points of her bosom. The boy was saying over and over with monotonous grit,

“Let me down. Let me down. Let me down. ” “Let him down,” said Gerry.

Instantly she dropped her arms. The boy landed in a pile of Bop hair and poking limbs. He got up, brushed his T-shirt off, and went back to sit by the television. Lynette moved b-ckwa,d India V. — VE 1W eyes were wild and wary as a rat’s. It was the first time I’d ever seen her with no words for what was going on.

“I’m interrupting here,” said Gerry. “Please excuse my butting in without knocking.” He knocked on the table now.

“Deal me in?”

“We were playing five-card stud.”

“Stud. That’s not quite appropriate for this one here,” he said smoothly, indicating King. “Five-card punk’s more like it.” King smiled a sick, tight grin and took up his hand of cards.

“Tell your wife to take her knuckles off that dirty fry pan which she means to sling at my head,” Gerry calmly continued.

Lynette took her hand out of the sink with a little squeak and rushed past us. We heard her pick up the phone in the next room then slam it down again. Presumably the lines was no longer properly connected.

“We must decide,” said Gerry seriously, taking a ragged toothpick from his breast pocket and sticking it in his mouth, “what we are playing for.”

King felt much better, or seemed to, when he glanced at his cards.

“I got money,” He said. “I got money in my account.”

“We’re not playing for your rubber check,” Gerry said. “You probably used your payoff up by now. We won’t play for money.

But we got to play for something, otherwise there’s no game.

King sat there bracing up his shoulders. He was coming back to his own.

“Aw c’mon,” he said. “Who told you I turned evidence. I never did.”

“I heard the tapes,” said Gerry, with a pursed smile full of snake’s milk. “Tapes of things I told nobody but you, my friend.

Yes, we got to play for something. We got to. have high stakes, otherwise there is no game.”

“What did you come here for?” blurted King. He tried to laugh If — Mod but he had to put his cards down to hide his shaking hands.

“Whaddyou want?”

“I want to play,” said Gerry very clearly and slowly, as if to a person who spoke a different language. “I came to play.”

I had been sitting there, “just listening.

“Let’s play for the car,” I said to King. “Let’s play for the Firebird you bought with June’s insurance.”

At the mention of my mom, Gerry’s face got stiff around the edges.

“June’s insurance,” he said wonderingly. I could see how his mind leapt back, making connections, jumping at the intersection points of our lives: his romance with June. The baby given to Grandma Kashpaw.

June’s son by Gordie. King. Her running off. Me growing up. And then at last June walking toward home in the Easter snow that, I saw now, had resumed failing softly in this room.

I could tell Gerry had not come here with precise notions on revenge, even though the testimony King gave had cost him years. Gerry Nanapush was curious and plagued by memory.

He’d come here out of these. Only the urge to see the rat’s life with his own eyes could have caused him to scale copper pipes four stories up and squeeze through that small kitchen window.

Only that curiosity and the urge to see someone again, or the hint of someone, the resemblance of June, could have brought him.

Now, however, dream and curiosity had found their reason.

There was the car, June’s car, which was a route of clean escape. If Gerry won the car, I knew I’d stay there and keep King strict company until my father managed to cross the border into Canada.

“Let’s play for the car,” Gerry agreed. “June’s car.”

But King didn’t want to play for the car.

“It’s mine,” he said.

— a-c “No, it’s really June’s,” explained Gerry. “Any one of us could be keeping it for June. ” “You don’t get it,” said King. There was a struggle going on inside him, the sense of what her car meant to him rising through a deep unwilling fog. But in the end he couldn’t voice what he felt.

“It’s not fair,” he muttered. “Just ain’t fair.”

“What is fair?” Gerry picked up the cards, shuffled, dealt them out again. “Society? Society is like this card game here, cousin.

We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.

We picked our cards up.

“Well this really ain’t fair,” said King. “This is ridiculous.” His neck was swelling up slightly, showing big veins. “By God,” he said, “this ain’t no way to treat an American vet! I never dodged it like you.” He nearly spat in vexation. But Gerry’s teeth just showed, crooked and gleaming white.

“Glad I didn’t have to go,” he said. “They couldn’t pay me enough to commit their murders.”

He sighed and raked the cards back into his palms.

“If it helps,” he said to King, “don’t think of it as losing a car but as saving your own snatching neck. ” King went all rigid. Gerry was already serving two consecutive life sentences. He’d have to die and be resurrected twice before he’d quit the joint.

“Deal and call,” King said in a choked voice. “Deal five and show.”

Gerry shoved the deck across the table to me and nodded that it was my deal. His face was cool and serene, like the pictures of those Chinese gods. So I shuffled carefully. I saw the patterns of it happen in my mind. I dealt the patterns out with perfect ease, keeping strict to Lulu’s form.

I dealt a pair to King.

Gerry got a straight.

And myselP I dealt myself a perfect family. A royal flush.

We turned our hands over, showing them, and then there was a long strained pause.

“I’ll take the keys,” I said.

Gerry was rubbing his chin, a silent study.

King took a long time working the keys off the ring. As he did so I took a deep breath and glanced up at my father.

“I’ll drive,” I said, “wherever you want to go.”

King threw the keys down, but I never heard them hit the table. I never heard them because between the throwing and the landing there was a thud on the door.

“Open up! Police!”

Now It was me paralyzed. The room went whirling. Awful fear of being trapped squeezed my middle. It was even worse than I ever imagined. I heard them tramping in the entryway and their voices echoing in the air shaft. I heard their booming voices, gravel clicking in their holsters, the champing at the door of the steel harnesses at their belts, and in my mind I saw their raw red hands forming in fists.

For what seemed the longest time, we sat there stiff as bricks.

Then someone moved. It was Howard. He came running from the next room on his toothpick legs.

“Hold on! I’m coming,” he yelled. “He’s here!”

The boy ran to the door, fumbled with the catch that was placed too high for him, screaming all the time,

“He’s here!

He’s here!”

And how the boy had changed-gone from being a playground of flickering shadows to old age. He was suddenly a tiny, lined, gray grownup who threw himself in concentration up to the latch, screaming the name of his father.

And you know, that was what scared me most. Him screaming his own dad’s name.

“King’s here! King’s here!”

I sat there like a lump on a log. This was it, I thought, this was the wages of everything we done. This was the wages of the father meeting up with the son and the ghost of a woman caught in the dark space between them. This was the wages. This was the sad fact.

I couldn’t linger too long on sad facts though, for Howard finally got them in. He stood there wheezing and crying and pointing at King.

I thought the police would leap across the table and collar Gerry, then tie me up, and I had just mustered up the courage to get arrested with a decent struggle when I noticed that the state police were still standing in the door. It hadn’t taken more than a quick look-see through that apartment for them to ascertain that Gerry wasn’t there.

I whirled around.

He was gone. Vanished. He’d been hoisted from his chair into thin space. There was nothing but air where my dad had been.

My lips formed his name, but I never said it aloud. To this day I think he laid a finger beside his nose and went flying up the air shaft.

That’s the only thing possible.

The police were mumbling. King was answering.

“Sorry for bothering you, sir,” they said. “Have a good evening.

And then they shut the door and we were left there. It all happened so fast we felt stunned flat. I didn’t even have time for relief that they never asked about me. Howard was laying on the floor, stretched out, still as death. I knew he was playing dead. I would have in his shoes.

I picked him up and I put him under the coat on the couch. It was a woman’s coat, an old plaid thing with one sleeve ripped loose and the lining split. It still held a sweet, fresh whiff of perfume. I smelled the woman’s comfort as I tucked the collar up around his neck.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You lost your head a minute. Go on and cry.”

But there was no tears. He lay there stiff and watchful, ready for the hurt. The sense in his black eyes already had retreated to an unknown depth.

“The registration,” I said to King. “The fucking registration.”

Lynette lurched to the bread box; her teeth were chattering.

She messed around among some crumpled papers and dried bread heels, and finally came up with the form. She put it on the table and made him sign it. I grabbed the keys. I folded the paper, put it in my pocket, and then I quit them without a word.

The car was stove-in on the right bumper so that one headlight flared off to the side. I had seen there was nicks and dents in the beautiful finished skin. I ran my hand up the racy invert line of the hood as I drove the tangled highways in a general homeward direction. I had the windows open, needing good fresh air. I was free as a bird, as the blue wings burning on the hood. Night was gentle and flowing swiftly to either side. The buzzing yellow arc lamps of the city were soon left behind, and the air began turning bold and sweet with the smells of melting earth. I thought I’d drive straight through the night, cleaving the soft wet silence with my peacefulness. I thought I would never quit driving, it felt so good. I had a full tank and I was buzzed up with Lynette’s coffee and the power of events. I knew my dad would get away.

He could fly. He could strip and flee and change into shapes of swift release. Owls and bees, two-toned Ramblers, buzzards, cottontails, and motes of dust. These forms was interchangeable with his. He was the clouds scudding over the moon, the wings of ducks banging in the slough, he was … I was waxing eloquent in my mind when all of a sudden the back end started knocking. I slowed down and it got louder, so I speeded up again and it got quiet. I thought it must be the jack not properly secured in the trunk. What else would I think? I started waxing off again. But then the knocking would start up, so I’d have to bear down and speed. It finally got me to the point where it was disrupting my concentration to make a sense of things. I didn’t want to stop, but I thought I’d have to just pull over and tie the jack in tight. So I stopped, and soon as I did I knew there was something strange going on, because the knocking started up fast and furious.

I jumped out, not knowing what on earth to think. I thought there was some animal trapped inside there. I wouldn’t put it past King to throw a dog or something in his back trunk. The night was so dark. I didn’t know that it might not spring for my throat, so I held the key out very ginger when I put it in the trunk latch. I turned the key and jumped back. The hood sprang up.

I couldn’t tell what was in there, but it was sure big, and loud-gulping, sighing, half gagging. I finally figured out that it was human, and rushed to drag the body out. As soon as he could speak, of course, I knew it was by a miracle none other than Gerry Nanapush. He was curled up tight as a baby in its mother’s stomach, wedged so thoroughly inside it took a struggle to get him loose.

just about bought it there,” he gasped when he was free, sitting on the side of the ditch. “I never realized I’d get so low on air.”

I just couldn’t completely register what was happening. After a while he straightened out and took a little brush from his pocket and put his hair back smooth and sleek in its tail. There was a sharp sweat on him.

I realized how scared he had been, and when I opened the car door, I put a hand on his shoulder to guide him in, These things had took their toll. He couldn’t talk for a long time, so we let the road take us along.

It was miles and miles before he roused himself to ask if I would take the next right-and turn I came to and drive until I hit Canada. He said he’d be obliged if I could let him off near the border.

“I got a wife and little girl up there,” he said. “I’m going to visit them.”

“You’re gonna make it this time,” I said. “Home free.”

“No,” he said, stretching his arms out, evidently feeling better,

“I

won’t ever really have what you’d call a home.”

He was right about that, of course. I’d never seen. He could not go back to a place where he was known and belonged. No matter where he settled down he would always be looking behind his shoulders. No matter what, he would always be on the run.

We talked a good long time about the reservation then. I caught him up on all the little black listings and scandals that had happened. He wanted to know everything about Lulu, his mom, so I told him how she’d started running things along with Grandma Kashpaw. I told him how she’d even testified for Chippewa claims and that people were starting to talk, now, about her knowledge as an old-time traditional.

“Times do change,” Gerry laughed. “She was always damn good in front of an audience.”

“She had her picture in the paper in Washington,” I said.

“I saw it.” He was silent. I guess he missed her pretty bad.

After miles of driving I asked.

“Did you know June?”

That question took him altogether by surprise. We were driving the small roads, the less traveled and less well kept. The dark was vast and thick. I had to drive slower and more careful than before.

After a moment Gerry said he knew June, way back when. A little while after that he blurted out,

“Hell on wheels! She was really something so beautiful.”

“You sound like you was in love with her,” I promptly said.

“In love with her like everybody else,” he told me. “I know she burned out young. I heard that. But I always keep seeing her the way she was at the time of my first incarceration.”

“Slim.” “But not too slim. Long legged. Always with a nice, a really nice laugh, but she was a shy one. So far away sometimes you couldn’t touch her.”

“She had a streak maybe, an odd streak.”

“I don’t know about that. She liked order. We’d live in motels.

She would always arrange the room real ri cat put everything away, make the bed every morning even though they’d strip it that afternoon.”

“Something I can’t remember,” I said; “did she have nice fingers?”

“Nice!” he said. “She had the prettiest damn fingers in the world!”

“I was wondering,” I said, “if you killed that trooper.”

If I tell you he said no, you will think he was lying. You will think a man don’t get two consecutive life sentences for nothing beneath the U.S. ‘udicial system. You’ll keep thinking that, too, unless you happen to rub against that system on your own. Then things will astonish you. I promise they will.

If I tell you he said yes, and relate to you how it all happened, it might get used against him. I’m sorry but I just don’t trust to write down what he answered, yes or no. We have entered an area of too deep water.

Let’s just say he answered: “That’s the penetrating mystery of it.

Nobody knows.”

I could feel him looking over at me a long time after speaking.

I concentrated on steering us very straight and put the heater on.

Up until then, I hadn’t really noticed how cold it was.

“Enough about me anyhows,” he said. “What’s your story?”

I told him all the things about me which I owned up to: how I — aid had quit school for the betterment of my mental powers, and learned on my own; how I was took on early by the Kashpaws and remained on the rez to look after the elder ones. I believe that my home is the only place I belong and was never interested to leave it, but circumstances forced my hand. I mentioned the one girl I ever trusted, Albertine. I told how she was a sister to me.

“I knew her too,” said Gerry. “Kind of quiet.”

“She was?” I never thought of her like that.

“You’re one hell of a card player,” Gerry complimented.

“Oh.” I got shy that I had out dealt him. “You must have played a lot in prison.”

“There’s nothing else to fool with.”

Suddenly I blurted out,

“I’m running from the army police.”

“Oh, that’s your problem! That’s your problem! I knew you had a problem!” He started smacking his big knee and shifted around in the bucket seat. He seemed excited.

“Then we’re both as good as cons.”

“That’s the damn truth,” I agreed.

But somehow, since we were splitting up, that did not give me a whole lot of consolation. He slapped his fist a couple of times in his palm and laughed, shaking his head. Suddenly he caught his breath and halted.

“You couldn’t have took your physical yet.”

I said I hadn’t.

“You don’t need to worry about the army,” he said, dropping his hands in his lap. “I’m glad.”

I glanced over at him. But he wasn’t looking at me and he ‘t moving at all. His head was turned. Evidently he was wasn I I watching the same dark scenery that unrolled about us endlessly-spring’s empty fields, standing water, and the signs of human life, the yard lamps, so modest and few and far between.

“Look here,” he said. I didn’t have to go in the army because “Oh,” I said. “Lucky for you.”

“Lucky for you too.”

I kept on steering.

“You’re a Nanapush man,” he said. I could feel him looking at me. I could feel the soft, broad, serious weight of all his features.

“We all have this odd thing with our hearts.”

He put a hand out and touched my shoulder.

There was a moment when the car and road stood still, and then I felt it. I felt my own heart give this little burping skip.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it’s like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it’s a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt-smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. We held each other’s arms, tight and manly, when we got to the border. A windbreak swallowed him up. I didn’t want my lights to show, so I cruised for miles and miles in the soft clear moonlight, slow, feeling the comfortable dark behind me and before.

I didn’t turn the headlights on until I hit the highways. Near dawn, I came to the bridge over the boundary river. I was getting pretty close to home now, so I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge, got out to stretch, and for some reason I remembered how the old ones used to offer tobacco to the water. I looked down over the rail.

It’s a dark, thick, twisting river. the bed is deep and narrow. I thought of June. The water played in whorls beneath me or flexed over sunken cars. How weakly I remembered her. If it made any sense at all, she was part of the great loneliness being carried up the driving current. I tell you, there was good in what she did for me, I know now.

The son that she acknowledged suffered more than Lipsha Morrissey did.

The thought of June grabbed my heart so, but I was lucky she turned me over to Grandma Kashpaw.

I still had Grandma’s hankie in my pocket. The sun flared. I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR LmISE ERDRICH was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954, the eldest of seven children. Her father and mother both taught at the Wahpeton (ND) Indian Boarding School, where she attended primary and secondary school before matriculating to Dartmouth College in 1972 as one of the first group of women admitted to that institution.

Upon her graduation in 1976, His. Erdrich returned to North Dakota to conduct poetry workshops sponsored by the National and State Endowments for the Humanities Poetry in the Schools Program. In 1978 she attended Johns Hopkins University and received an MFA in Creative Writing the following year. She then moved to Boston to become editor of the Boston Indian Council newspaper, The Circle. In 1980 she received a fellowship to the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and in 1981 she was named Writer-in-Residence at Dartmouth’s Native American Studies Program. Her short stories have won widespread praise, appearing in The Atlantic Monthly, His.” Mother Jones, Chicago, and The Paris Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories of 1983, The Pushcart Prize Anthology of 1983, and The 0. Henry Prize Stories of 1985. She also won the first Nelson Algren Award in 1997 and The Society of Magazine Editors’ Award in 1983. Jacklight, a poetry collection, was published in 1984.

In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984, Love Medicine has won the Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Novel from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, the Best First Fiction Award from the Great Lakes College Association, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His. Erdrich’s next novel, The Beet Queen, will be published in 1986.

His. Erdrich now lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Michael Dorris, and their five children. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.