Love Medicine Part 19

Then he raised it. As he turned he brought smas.h.i.+ng down between her eyes. She sagged back into the seat again. Gordie began to drive.

This time, when the shaking started, there was no limit to the depth.

It was in the bones, then the marrow of the bones. It ran all through him. His head snapped back. He stopped the car. The crowbar was in his lap in case she came to life again. He held it, fusing his hands to the iron to keep them still.

He sat there in the front seat, holding tight to the bar, shaking violently all around it. He heard loud voices. The winds.h.i.+eld cracked into a spider's nest. The dash fell open and the radio shrieked. The crowbar fell, silencing that too.

The shaking stopped, a sudden lull that surprised him.

In that clear moment it came to his attention that he'd Just killed June.

She was in the backseat, sprawled, her short skirt hiked up over her hips. The sheer white panties glowed. Her hair was tossed in a dead black swirl. What had he done this time? Had he used the bar? It was in his hands.

"Get rid of the evidence," He said, but his fingers locked shut around the iron, as if frozen to it. He would never be able to open his hands again. He was cracking, giving way. Control was caving like weathered ground. The blood roared in his ears. He could not see where he was falling, but he knew, at length, that he'd landed in an area of terrible vastness where nothing was familiar.

Sister Mary Martin de Porres played the clarinet and sometimes, when she was troubled or sleep was elusive, wrote her own music. Tonight she woke, staring, from an odd dream. For a long moment she vaguely believed she was at home in Lincoln. She had been drawing a cool bath for herself, filling the clawed tub, stirring the water with her hands.

The water smelled sharp, of indestructible metals. The cicadas buzzed outside, and the pods were blackening on the catalpas. She thought that once shea"add stripped herself and crawled into the tub, she would change, she would be able to breathe under water. But she woke first.

She turned on her side, found she was in her room at Sacred Heart, and reached for her eyegla.s.ses. Her clock said one. She watched the glowing minute hand glide forward and knew, without even attempting to close her eyes again, that it was another of "her nights," as the others put it on those days when she was unusually out of sorts.

"Sister Mary Martin's had one of her nights again."

Her nights were enjoyable while she was having them, which was part of the problem. Once she woke in a certain mood and thought of the clarinet, sleep seemed dull, unnecessary even, although she knew for a fact that she was not a person who could go sleepless without becoming irritable. She rolled out of bed.

She was a short, limber, hardworking woman, who looked much younger than she was, that is, she looked thirtyish instead of forty-two, Most of the others, people noticed, looked younger than their true ages, also.

"It's no darn use anyway," she mumbled, slipping on her old green robe.

Already she felt excited about rising alone, seeing no one. Her own youthfulness surprised her on nights like this. Her legs felt springy and lean, her body taut like a girl's. She raised her arms over her head, stretched hard, and brought them down.

Then she eased through her door. It was the one at the end of the halls, the quietest room of all. She walked soundlessly along the tiles, down the stairs, through another corridor, and back around the chapel into a small sitting room impossibly cluttered with afghans and pillows.

She turned on the floor lamp and pulled her instrument case from beneath the sofa. Kneeling with it, she lifted the pieces from the crushed and molded velvet and fit them together. She took a small, lined music notebook from a shelf of books. A sharpened pencil was already attached to the spine with a string.

Last of all, before she sat down, she draped an enormous bee yellow afghan around her shoulders. Then she settled herself, hooked her cold feet in the bottom of the knit blanket, wet the reed, and began to play.

Sometimes it put her to sleep in half an hour. Other times she hit on a tune and scribbled, wherever it took her, until dawn.

The sitting room was newly attached to the main convent and insulated heavily, so her music disturbed no one. On warm nights she even opened windows and let the noises drift in, clear in the dry air, from the town below. They were wild noises hoa.r.s.e wails, reeling fiddle music, rumble of unm.u.f.flered motors, and squeals of panicked acceleration.

Then after three or four in the morning a kind of dazed blue silence fell, and there was nothing but her own music and the black crickets in the wall.

Tonight, perhaps because of her dream, which was both familiar and something she did not understand, the music was both faintly menacing and full of wonder. It took her in circles of memories. A shape rose in her mind, a tree that was fully branched like the main candelabrum on the altar of the Blessed Virgin. It had been her favorite tree to climb on as a child, but at night she had feared the rasp of its branches.

She stopped, particularly struck by a chance phrase, and played it over with slight variations until it seemed too lovely to discard.

Then she wrote it down. She worked in silence for a while after, seeing something that might become a pattern, approaching and retreating from the strength of her own design.

An hour or perhaps two hours pa.s.sed. The air was still. Sister Mary Martin heard nothing but the music, even when she stopped playing to write down the notes. A slim gravel path led around the back of the convent, but perhaps, she thought later, the man had walked through the wet gra.s.s, for she did not hear him approaching and only realized his presence at the window when the sill raffled. He'd tried to knock, but had fallen instead against the frame. Mary Martin froze in her chair and laid the clarinet across her lap.

"Who's there?" she said firmly. There was no answer. She was annoyed, first to have her night invaded and then with herself for not having drawn the blinds, because the sky was black and she could not see even the shadow of the prowler's shape while she herself was perfectly exposed, as on a stage.

"What do you want?" There was still no answer, and her heart sped, although the windows were screened and secure. She could always rouse the others if she had to. But she was consistently the one called upon to lift heavy boxes and jump start the commuity's car. Probably it would be up to her to scare off this intruder m herself, even if the others came downstairs.

She reached up and switched the lamp off. The room went utterly dark.

Now she heard his breath rasp, his shudder lightly ring the screen. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw the blunt outline of him, hang-dog, slumped hard against the window.

"What do you want?" she repeated, rising from the chair. She began to lower the clarinet to the carpet, then held it. If he came through the screen slieCOL11d poke him with the playing end. She walked over to the dense shadow of the bookshelf, near the window and against the wall, where she thought it would be impossible for him to see her.

A breeze blew through the screen and she smelled the sour reek of him.

Drunk. Probably half conscious.

But now he roused himself with a sudden *erk and spoke.

"I come to take confession. I need to confess it.

She stood against the wall, next to the window, arms folded against her chest.

"I'm not a priest."

"Bless me Father for I have sinned.

The voice was blurred, stupidly childish.

"I'll go get a priest for you," she said.

"It's been, s.h.i.+t, ten years since my last confession." He laughed, then he coughed.

The wind blew up, suddenly, a cold gust from the garden, and a different, specifically evil, smell came from his clothes, along with the smell of something un definably worse.

"What do you want?" she said for the third time.

He banged the screen with his elbow. He turned, hugging himself, pounding his arms with his fists, and threw his forehead against the window frame. He was weeping, she recognized at last. This was the soundless violent way that this particular man wept.

"All right," she said, knowing and not wanting to know. It would be a very bad thing that he had to say. "Tell me."

And then he tried to tell her, stumbling and stuttering, about the car and the crowbar and how he'd killed June.

A low humming tension collected In the dark around Mary Martin as she sorted through his Tumbled story. He could not stop talking. He went on and on. Finally it became real for her also.

He had *just now killed his wife. Her throat went dry. She held the clarinet across her chest with both hands, fingers pressed on the warm valves and ebony. She listened. Clarity. She could not think. The word fell into her mind, but her mind was not clear.

The metal valve caps were silky smooth. She thought she smelled the blood on him. A knot of sickness formed in her stomach and uncurled, rising in her throat, burning. She wanted urgently to get away from him and sleep. She needed to lie down.

"Stop," she begged. Her throat closed. He fell silent on her word.

But it was too late. She saw the woman clubbed, distinctly heard the bar smash down, saw the vivid blood.

Her fists were tight k.n.o.bs. Tears had filled the slight cup where her gla.s.ses frames touched her cheeks, and they leaked straight down from there along the corners of her mouth. The tears dropped on her hands, She had to say something.

"Are you sure that she's dead?"

His silence told her that he was. He seemed to have relaxed, breathing easier, as if telling her had removed some of the burden _,dig from him already She heard him fumble through his clothes. A match snicked. There was a brief glare of light, and then tobacco curled faintly through the window and disappeared in the black room.

Something lit furiously in Mary Martin when she heard him take the smoke in with a grateful sigh. Light pinwheeled behind her eyes, red and jagged, giving off a tide of heat that swept her to the window.

For what she did not know.

Now she stood, trembling, inches from him and spoke into the shadow of his face.

"Where is she?"

"Outside in my car."

"Take me to see her then," said Mary Martin.

To get to the portico of the back entryway, she had to pa.s.s through the dark chapel. A candle burned, soft orange in its jar, before the small wooden sacristy where the host was kept. She walked by without genuflecting or making the sign of the cross, then made herself stop and go back. The calm of the orange glow reproached her. But after she had bent her knee and crossed herself she felt no different. She left her clarinet on one of the chairs and walked out to unlatch the back door.

She stepped into the coot night air. He had gone before her and was already partway down the path walking bowlegged for balance. She stamped out the glowing cigarette stub he flipped in the gra.s.s. He stopped twice, giving in to a spasm of rolling s.h.i.+vers against a drainpipe then again where the gate opened out to the front yard. His car was parked in the lot, askew. She saw it right off-a long, low slung green car directly lit by the yard light. He stopped at the edge of the gravel lot, swaying slightly, and put his hand to his mouth.

She had not seen his face yet, and now, as she stood beside him, forced herself to look, to find something, before she went to the car, that would make it impossible to hate him.

But his face was the puckered, dull mask of a drunk, and she turned quickly away. She walked over to the car, leaving him where he stood.

The backseat was lit from one side, she saw, and so she walked up to it, taking deep breaths before she bent and gazed through the window.

Mary Martin had prepared herself so strictly for the sight of a woman's body that the animal jolted her perhaps more than if the woman had been there. At the first sight of it, so strange and awful, a loud cackle came from her mouth. Her legs sagged, suddenly old, and a fainting surge of weakness spread through her. She managed to open the door.

There was no mistake-dun flanks, flag tail, curled legs, and lolling head, The yard light showed it clearly. But she had to believe. She bent into the car, put her hands straight out, and lowered them carefully onto the deer. The flesh was stiff, but the short hair seemed warm and alive. The smell hit her-the same frightening smell that had been on the man-some death musk that deer give off, acrid and burning and final. Suddenly and without warning, like her chest were cracking, the weeping broke her. It came out of heTwith hard violence, loud in her ears, a wild burst of sounds that emptied her.

When it was over, she found herself in the backseat wedged against the animal's body.

Night was lifting. The sky was blue gray. She thought she could smell the dew in the dust and silence. Then, almost dreamily, she shook her head toward the light, blank for a moment as a waking child.

She heard the wailing voice, an echo of hers, and remembered the man at the edge of the gravel lot.

She crawled from the car, shook the cramps from her legs, and started toward him. Her hands made gestures in the air, but no sound came from her mouth. When he saw that she was coming at him he stopped in the middle of a bawl. He stiffened, windilled his arms, and stumbled backward in a cardboard fright.

Lights were on behind him in the convent. Mary Martin began to run.

He whirled to all sides, darting glances, then fled with incredible quickness back along the sides of the building to the long yard where there were orchards, planted pines, then the reservation gra.s.s and woods.

She followed him, calling now, into the apple trees but lost him there, and all that morning, while they waited for the orderlies and the tribal police to come with cuffing and litters and a court order, they heard him crying like a drowned person, howling in the open fields.

how_ LOVE MEDICINE r (1982) 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 grat.i.tude 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Ma.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 d.a.m.n 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 surpa.s.sed 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 d.a.m.n 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.