Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

to you.”
    J Her mouth twists. She tosses her head and looks away.
    I’m not ashamed, but there are some times this happens: alone in the woods, checking the trap line I find a wounded animal that hasn’t died well, or, worse, it’s still living, so that I have to put it out of its misery. Sometimes it’s just a big bird I only winged. When I do what I have to do, my throat swells closed sometimes. I touch the suffering bodies like they were killed saints I should handle with gentle reverence.
    This is how I take Marie’s hand. This is how I hold her wounded hand in my hand.
    She never looks at me. I don’t think she dares let me see her face.
    We sit alone. The sun falls down the side of the world and the hill goes dark. Her hand grows thick and fevered, heavy in my own, and I don’t want her, but I want her, and I cannot let go.
    bob..-, THE BEADS r a S (1948)

MARIE KASHPAW
    I didn’t want June Morrissey when they first brought her to my house.
    But I ended up keeping her the way I would later end up keeping her son, Lipsha, when they brought him up the steps. I didn’t want her because I had so many mouths I couldn’t feed. I didn’t want her because I had to pile the children in a cot at night. One of the babies slept in a drawer to the dresser. I didn’t want June.
    Sometimes we had nothing to eat but grease on bread. But then the two drunk ones told me how the girl had survived-by eating pine sap in the woods. Her mother was my sister, Lucille. She died alone with the girl out in the bush.
    “We don’t know how the girl done it,” said the old drunk woman who I didn’t claim as my mother anymore.
    “Lucille was coughing blood,” offered the Morrissey, the whining no-good who had not church-married my sister.
    –OEM
    “You dog,” I said. “Where were you when she died?”
    “He was working in the potato fields,” the old drunk one wheedled.
    Her eyes had squeezed back into her face. Her nose had spread and her cheeks were shot with black veins.
    “He was rolling in his own filth more like it,” I said.
    They were standing on my steps because I would not ask them onto my washed floor,
    “I can’t take in another wild cat,” I said. Maybe it scared me, the feeling I might have for this one. I knew how it was to lose a child that got too special. I’d lost a boy. I had also lost a girl who would have almost been the age this poor stray was.
    Those Lazarres just stood there, yawning and picking their gray teeth, with the girl between them most likely drunk too. Not older than nine years. She could hardly stand upright. I looked at her.
    What I saw was starved bones, a shank of black strings, a piece of rag on her I wouldn’t have used to wipe a pig. There were beads around her neck. Black beads on a silver chain.
    “What’s that, a rosary on her neck?”
    They started laughing, seesawing against the rail, whooping when they tried to tell the joke out.
    “It was them bug eyes,” said the old one, “them ignoret bush Crees who found her and couldn’t figure out how she was raised, except the spirits.”
    “They slung them beads around her neck.”
    “To protect themselves.”
    “Get out of here”-I grabbed the girl-“before I sic the dogs on you.
    “Too good,” the old drunk flapped, “too damn good to wipe your own crap.” ‘t you. Storing money in your jar. What about ap, am your mother!
    Ignatius!” she shrieked. That was the name of my father.
    The Morrissey had enough sense to be dragging her down the steps.
    L–– mom
    “Prince!” I veiled. “Dukie! Rex!”
    The dogs came bounding up. The two went stumbling off, holding each other’s sagging weighted arms, and that was all I had to see of those Lazarres for a long time.
    So I took the girl. I kept her. It wasn’t long before I would want to hold her against me tighter than any of the others. She was like me, and she was not like me. Sometimes I thought she was more like Eli. The woods were in June, after all, just