Love Medicine

Lulu was bustling about the kitchen in a calm, automatic frenzy. She seemed to fill pots wth food by pointing at them and take things from the oven that she'd never put in. The table jumped to set itself. The pop foamed into glasses, and the milk sighed to the lip. The youngest boy, crushed in a high chair, watched eagerly while things placed themselves around him. Everyone sat down. The the boys began to stuff themselves with a savage and astonishing efficiency. Before Bev had cleaned his plate once, they'd had thirds, and by the time he looked up from dessert, they had melted through the walls. The youngest had levitated from his high chair and was sleeping out of sight. The room was empty except for Lulu and himself

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears

She was a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved.

She was a natural blond with birdlike legs and, true, no chin, but great blue snapping eyes

Gordie had dark, round, eager face, creased and puckered from being stitched up after an accident. His face was like something valuable that was broken and put carefully back together.

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.

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... 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 stars.

There they were. And he was really loving her up good, boy, and she was going hell for leather. Sheets were flapping on the lines above and washcloths, pillowcases, shirts was also flying through the air, for they was trying to clear a place for themselves in a high-heaped but shallow laundry cart.

They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath, but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.

Jamás he creído, en toda mi vida, en las medidas humanas. Números, horas, metros, hectáreas. Son sólo artimañas para recortar la naturaleza. Sé que nuestros cerebros no pueden abarcar el gran plan del mundo, de modo que no trato de hacerlo, me limito a dejarlo entrar. No creo en enumerar a las criaturas de Dios. Jamás respondí cuando llamaba a mi puerta el censo de los Estados Unidos, aunque dicen que es bueno para los indios. Pues bien, ya podéis repetir mis palabras. Yo digo que cada vez que nos cuentan saben exactamente de qué cantidad de nosotros deben librarse.

Nuestros dioses no son perfectos, eso es lo que digo, pero por lo menos aparecen. Te pueden hacer un favor si se lo pides como es debido. No tienes que gritar. Pero tienes que conocer, como he dicho, la forma de pedirlo. Esto es un problema, porque saber pedir es un arte los chippewa perdieron cuando llegaron los católicos. Incluso ahora me pregunto si el Poder Supremo se retiró, si tenemos que gritar o si sencillamente no hablamos su idioma.

Tu vida es distinta cuando aceptas la muerte y comprendes la actitud de tu corazón. Usas la vida, a partir de ese momento, como una prenda de ropa usada de la misión; ligeramente porque comprendes que en realidad no has pagado nada por ella, pero al mismo tiempo la cuidas porque sabes que nunca más podrás hacer una compra tan buena. Y también siente que alguien la ha usado antes que tú y que alguien la usará después.

"Rushes Bear always said that a man has to enter and enter, repeatedly, as if in punishment for having ever left the woman's body."

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.

“By that time Dot weighed over two hundred pounds, most of it peanut-butter cups and egg-salad sandwiches. She was a short, broad-beamed woman with long yellow eyes and spaces between each of her strong teeth.”

“At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. Or a dance hall. And all the world’s wandering souls were dancing there.”

I like Louise Erdrich’s wry writing style, which is in full evidence even in this first novel. Some of the characters are sad, many are poor, and some are suicidal, but all are handled with respect and their human foibles are viewed with tolerance and sympathy.

I offer a few examples of the author’s style:

A pivotal character, whose recent death is described early in the novel: She felt that underneath it all her body was pure and naked—only the skins were stiff and old. Even if he was no different, she would get through this again. . . . It was almost hot by the week after Easter, when I found out, in Mama’s letter, that June was gone—not only dead but suddenly buried, vanished off the land like that sudden snow.

The thoughts of one of the younger women in the story. I was so mad at my mother, Zelda, that I didn’t write or call for almost two months. She should have gone up the nun’s hill to the convent, like she wanted, instead of having me. But she had married Swede Johnson from off-reservation, and I’d arrived premature. He’d had the grace, at least, to go AWOL from army boot camp and never let his face be seen again.

Two old men that we meet at the beginning of the novel, but will see in more detail as the book returns again and again to the past: Nector came home from boarding school knowing white reading and writing, while Eli knew the woods. Now, these many years later, hard to tell why or how, my great-uncle Eli was still sharp, while Grandpa’s mind had left us, gone wary and wild.

Another major character, whose life was altered by a brief stay in the convent: I had the mail-order Catholic soul you get in a girl raised out in the bush, whose only thought is getting into town. For Sunday Mass is the only time my aunt brought us children in except for school. . . . It was a poor convent. I didn’t see that then, but I know that now. Compared to others it was humble, ragtag, out in the middle of no place. It was the end of the world to some. Where the maps stopped. Where God had only half a hand in the creation. Where the Dark One had put in thick bush, liquor, wild dogs, and Indians.

A philosophical view of the life process: What I saw was time passing, each minute collecting behind me before I had squeezed from it any life. It went so fast, is what I’m saying, that I myself sat still in the center of it. Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away. It was happening already

Description of a second-generation suicide: “Got to cool me off!” he shouts all of a sudden. Then he runs over to the river and jumps in. There’s boards and other things in the current. It’s so high. No sound comes from the river after the splash he makes, so I run right over. I look around. It’s getting dark. I see he’s halfway across the water already, and I know he didn’t swim there but the current took him. It’s far. I hear his voice, though, very clearly across it. “My boots are filling,” he says.

Another description of death, in old age, in this case: 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 Matchimanito. Big thoughts was on his line and he had half a case of beer in the boat.

Some additional ruminations about life: 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 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.