Love Medicine: List 1

Between my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis.

She always used the royal we, to multiply the censure of what she said by invisible others.

All I knew of him was pictures, blond, bleak, and doomed to wander, perhaps as much by Mama’s rage at her downfall as by the uniform.

Tattered silver windbreaks bounded flat, plowed fields that the government had paid to lie fallow.

Even in the distance you sense hills from their opposites—pits, dried sloughs, ditches of cattails, potholes.

I grew up with her in an aqua-and-silver trailer, set next to the old house on the land my great-grandparents were allotted when the government decided to turn Indians into farmers.

“Don’t trust nothing you don’t see with your own eyes. June was all packed up and ready to come home. They found her bags when they busted in her room. She walked out there because”—Aurelia foundered, then her voice strengthened—“what did she have to come home to after all? Nothing!”

“What’s her rush? Believe me”—she addressed me now with mock serious vigor—“marriage is not the answer to it all. I tried it enough myself.”

Aurelia gave her heady snort again, and this time did not hold her tongue.

Last of all the entire rest of her squeezed through the door, swathed in acres of tiny black-sprigged flowers.

He’d been an astute political dealer, people said, horse-trading with the government for bits and shreds.

Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished.

Perhaps his loss of memory was a protection from the past, absolving him of whatever had happened.

But he smiled into the air and lived calmly now, without guilt or desolation.

The sisters sniffed, fished Kleenex from their sleeves, glanced pensively at one another, and put the story to rest.

King was slumped morosely in the front seat of the car...

Now, brooding under the bill of his blue hat, he turned that moody stare through the windshield and shook his head at his wife.

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

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

The rubber foot mat, the fenders, then the little ruts and stones as he clambered toward the front steps.

Eli and Gordie agreed with solemn grins.

King’s lip curled down in some imitation of soap-opera bravado, but his chin trembled.

Her voice rose sharply in its trill.

She sneaked a cigarette from Eli’s pack, giving him a coy smirk in return.

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

Where they have the convent is on top of the highest hill, so that from its windows the Sisters can be looking into the marrow of the town.

The face of God you could hardly look at. But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side. The cracked whitewash and swallows nesting in the busted ends of eaves.

The face of God you could hardly look at. But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side. The cracked whitewash and swallows nesting in the busted ends of eaves.

I was privy to both worlds of his knowledge.

Sister Leopolda was the consecrated nun who had sponsored me to come there.

She took a pot of salve from the bookcase and began to smooth it upon my burns.

My name was buzzing up and down the room, like a fat autumn fly lighting on the tips of their tongues between Latin, humming up the heavy blood-dark curtains, circling their little cosseted heads.

I let it swing through the air, imparting a saint's blessing.

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

The geese are to my advantage now; their weight on my arms helps pin her; their dead wings flap around us; their necks loll, and their black eyes stare, frozen.