Authors: Louise Erdrich
That night, I tried to visit Lulu’s window out of turn. It was not the sixth night of the week, but I know she expected me. I know because she turned me away.
And that is where the suffering and burning set in to me with fierceness beyond myself No sooner had I given her up than I wanted Lulu back.
It is a hot night in August. I am sitting in the pool of lamplight at my kitchen table. It is night six, but I am home with Marie and the children. They are all around me, breathing deep or mum being in a dream. Aurelia and Zelda are hunched in the roll-cot beside the stove.
Zelda moans in the dim light and says
“Oh, quick!” Her legs move and twitch like she is chasing something.
Her head is full of crossed black pins.
I have my brown cowhide briefcase beside me, open, spilling neat-packed folders and brochures and notes. I take out a blue lined tablet and a pencil that has never been sharpened. I shave the pencil to a point with my pocketknife. Then I clean the knife and close it up and wonder if I’m really going to write what some part of my mind has decided.
I lick my thumb. The pencil strokes. August 7, 1957. My hand moves to the left. Dear Marie. I skip down two lines as I was taught in the government school. I am leaving you. I press so hard the lead snaps on the pencil.
Zelda sits bolt upright, sniffing the air. She was always a restless sleeper. She would walk through the house as a little girl, to come and visit her parents. Often I would wake to find her standing at the end of our bed, holding the post with both hands as if it was dragging her someplace.
Now, almost full-grown, Zelda frowns at something in her dream and then slowly sinks back beneath her covers and disappears but for one smudge of forehead. I give up. I take the pencil in my hand and begin to write.
Dear Marie, Can’t see going on with this when every day I’m going down even worse. Sure I loved you once, but all this time I am seeing Wu also. Now she pressured me and the day has come I must get up and go. I apologize. I found true love with her. I don’t have a choice.
But that doesn’t mean Nector Kashpaw will ever forget his own.
After I write this letter, I fold it up very quickly and lay it in the briefcase. Then I tear off a fresh piece of paper and begin another.
Dear Lulu, You wanted me for so long. Well you’ve got me now! Here I am for the taking, girl, all one hundred percent yours. This is my official proposal put down in writing.
Yours till hell freezes over, Nector iL And then, because maybe I don’t mean it, maybe I just need to get it off my mind, I lock the letters in the briefcase, blow out the lamp, and make my way around sleeping children to Marie. I hang my shirt and pants on the bedpost and slip in next to her.
She always sleeps on her side, back toward me, curved around the baby, which is next to the wall so it won’t tumble off. She sleeps like this ever since I rolled over on one of them. I fit around her and crook my arm at her waist.
She smells of milk and wood ash and sun-dried cloth. Marie has never used a bottle of perfume. Her hands are big, nicked from sharp knives, roughed by bleach. Her back is hard as a plank. Still she warms me.
I feel like pleading with her but I don’t know what for. I lay behind her, listening to her breath sigh in and out, and the ache gets worse.
It fills my throat like a lump of raw metal. I want to clutch her and never let go, to cry to her and tell her what I’ve done.
I make a sound between my teeth and she moves, still in her dream.
She pulls my arm down tighter, mumbles into her pillow.
I take a breath with her breath. I take another. And then my body becomes her body. We are breathing as one, and I am failing gently into sleep still not knowing what will happen.
I sleep like I’ve been clubbed, all night, very hard. When I wake she has already gone into town with Zelda. They were up early, canning apples. The jars are stacked upside down at one end of the table, reddish gold, pretty with the sun shining through them. I brew my morning coffee and chew the cold galette she has left for me. I am still wondering what I am going to do. It seems as though, all my life up till now, I have not had to make a decision. I just did what came along, went wherever I was taken, accepted when I was called on. I never said no. But now it is one or the other, and my mind can’t stretch far enough to understand this.
I go outside and for a long time I occupy myself chopping wood. The children know how to take care of themselves. I pitch and strain at the wood, splitting with a wedge and laying hard into the ax, as if, when the pile gets big enough, it will tell me what to do.
As I am working I suddenly think of Lulu. I get a clear mental picture of her sitting on the lap of her brother-in-law. I see Beverly’s big hand reach out and wrap around her shoulder. Lulu’s head tips to the side, and her eyes gleam like a bird’s. He is nodding at her. Then his mouth is falling onto hers.
I throw the ax. The two lovebirds propel me into the house. I am like a wild man clutching through my briefcase. I find the letter to Marie and I take it out, read it once, then anchor it on the table with the jar of sugar. I cram the letter to Lulu in my pocket, and then I go.
All I can see, as I gallop down the steps and off into the woods, is Lulu’s small red tongue moving across her teeth. My mind quivers, but I cannot stop myself from seeing more. I see his big face nuzzle underneath her chin. I see her hands fly up to clutch his head. She rolls her body expertly beneath his, and then I am crashing through the brush, swatting leaves, almost too blind to see the old deer path that twists through the woods.
I creep up on her house, as though I will catch them together, even though I have heard he is back in the Cities. I crouch behind some bushes up the hill, expecting her dogs to scent me any moment. I watch.
Her house is fresh painted, yellow with black trim, cheerful as a bee.
Her petunias are set out front in two old tractor tires painted white.
After a time, when the dogs don’t find me, I realize they have gone off somewhere. And then I see how foolish I am. The house is quiet. No Beverly. No boys in the yard, either, fixing cars or target practicing.
They are gone, leaving Lulu alone.
I put my hands to my forehead. It is burning as if I have a fever.
Since the Nash I have never taken off Lulu’s clothes in the daylight, and it enters my head, now, that I could do this if I went down to her house. So I make my way out of the dense bush.
For the first time ever, I go up to her front door and knock.
This feels so normal, I am almost frightened. Something in me is about to burst. I need Lulu to show me what this fearful thing is.
I need her hand to pull me in and lead me back into her bedroom, and her voice to tell me how we were meant for each other by fate. I need her to tell me I am doing right.
But no one comes to the door. There is no sound. It is a hot, still afternoon, and nothing stirs in Lulu’s dull grass, though deep in the trees, to all sides, I have the sense now of something moving slowly forward. An animal that is large, dense furred, nameless. These thoughts are crazy, I know, and I try to cast them from my mind. I round the house. The backyard is the one place where Lulu’s tidiness has been defeated. The ground is cluttered with car parts, oil pans, pieces of cement block, and other useful junk.
No one answers at the back door either, so I sit down on the porch.
I tell myself that no matter how long it takes Lulu to get here, I will wait. I am DOtgoodatwaiting, like my brother Ell, who can sit without moving a muscle for an hour while deer approach him. I am not good at waiting, but I try. I roll a cigarette and smoke it as slow as possible. I roll another. I try to think of anything but Lulu or Marie or my children. I think back to the mad captain in Moby Dick and how his leg was bit off. Perhaps I was wrong, about Ishmael I mean, for now I see signs of the captain in myself. I bend over and pick up a tin can and crush it flat. For no reason! A bit later I bang the side of her house until my fist hurts. I drop my head in my hands. I tell her, out loud, to get back quick. I do not know what I will do if she doesn’t.
I am tired. I have started to shake. That is when I take out the letter I have crumpled in my pocket. I decide that I will read it a hundred times, very slowly, before I do anything else. So I read _J it, word by word, until the words make no sense. I go on reading it.
I am keeping careful, concentrated count, when suddenly I think of Marie.
I see her finding the other letter now. Sugar spills across the table as she sits, crying out in her shock. A ‘ar of apples explodes.
j The children shout, frightened. Grease bubbles over on the stove.
The dogs howl. She clutches the letter and tears it up.
I lose count. I try reading Lulus letter once more, but I cannot finish it. I crumple it in a ball, throw it down, then I light up another cigarette and begin to smoke it very quick while I am rolling a second to keep my hands distracted.
This is, in fact, how the terrible thing happens.
I am so eager to smoke the next cigarette that I do not notice I have thrown down my half-smoked one still lit on the end. I throw it right into the ball of Lulu’s letter. The letter smokes. I do not notice right off what is happening, and then the paper flares.
Curious and dazed, I watch the letter burn.
I swear that I do nothing to help the fire along.
Weeds scorch in a tiny circle, and then a bundle of greasy rags puffs out in flames. It burns quickly. I leave the steps. An old strip of rug curls and catches onto some hidden oil slick in the grass.
The brown blades spurt and crackle until the flame hits a pile of wood chips. Behind that are cans of gasoline that the boys have removed from dead cars. I step back. The sun is setting in the windows, black and red. I duck. The gas cans roar, burst. Blue lights flash on behind my eyelids, and now long oily flames are licking up the side of the house, moving snakelike along the windows of the porch, finding their way into the kitchen where the kerosene is stored and where Lulu keeps her neatly twine-tied bundles of old newspapers.
The fire is unstoppable. The windows are a furnace. They pop out, raining glass, but I merely close my eyes and am untouched.
I have done nothing.
I feel the heat rise up my legs and collect, burning for Lulu, but burning her out of me.
I don’t know how long I stand there, moving back inch by inch as fire rolls through the boards, but I have nearly reached the woods before the heat on my face causes me to abandon the sight, finally, and turn.
That is when I see that I have not been alone.
I see Marie standing in the bush. She is fourteen and slim again. I can do nothing but stare, rooted to the ground. She stands tall, straight and stern as an angel. She watches me Red flames from the burning house glare and flicker in her eyes. Her skin sheds light. We are face to face, and then she begins to lift on waves of heat. Her breast is a glowing shield. Her arm is a white hot spear. When she raises it the bush behind her spreads, blazing open like wings.
I go down on my knees, a man of rags and tinder. I am ready to be burned in the fire, too, but she reaches down and lifts me up.
“Daddy,” she says, “let’s get out of here. Let’s go.
F1 ESH AND BLOOD r .J (1957)
MARIE KASHPAW
There was surely no reason I should go up that hill again. For days, for weeks after I heard Sister Leopolda was dying, I told myself I was glad. I told myself good riddance to her puckered mind. Boiling jars that morning, pouring syrup, I told myself what she deserved. The jars were hot. She deserved to be packed in one alive. But as soon as I imagined that, I pitied her in the jar, balled up in her black rag, staring through the glass. It was always that way. Through the years I had thought up many various punishments I would like to commit on the nun who’d cracked my head and left a scar that was tight and cold in my palm, a scar that ached on Good Friday and throbbed in the rain. But every time I thought of her damned, I relented. I saw her kneeling, dead faced, without love.
I stood in my kitchen packing apples in jars, pouring the boiling syrup and cinnamon over them. I knew what I knew. She had gone steadily downhill. In the past years of her life it was canes, chairs, confinement. They said she prayed to herself twenty-four hours at a stretch. There were some who touched the hem of her garment to get blessed. As if she were the saint. Bag of bones! I knew the truth.
She had to pray harder than the others because the Devil still loved her far better than any on that hill. She walked the sorrowful mysteries one year with bloody feet. There were those who kept the gravel stones she bled on. I wouldn’t. I knew the Devil drove her toward grace with his persistence. She got famous. Like Saint Theresa, she lived for many weeks on Sacred Hosts.
But I hadn’t seen her visiting the sick nor raising the sad ones up.
No everyday miracles for her. Her talent was the relishment of pain, foaming at the mouth, and it was no surprise to me that lately there had been a drastic disarrangement of her mind.
I heard that she was kept in her little closet now. Confined. I heard she had an iron spoon that she banged on the bedstead to drive away spirits. Sparks flew up her walls. They had to keep her room very clean, I heard, otherwise she licked dust off the windowsills.
She made meals of lint. They didn’t dare let a dust ball collect beneath her bed. I knew why this had happened. I knew it was the heat.
The prolonged heat of praying had caused her brain to boil.
I also knew what they did not know about her appetite for dust.
She ate dust for one reason: to introduce herself to death. So now she was inhabited by the blowing and the nameless.
Packing apples in my jars, I came to the last. I was thinking of her with such concentration that I poured the syrup on my hand.
“Damn buzzard!” I screamed, as if she’d done it. And she might have.
Who knew how far the influence spread?