Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich Page B

snapped me from my chair. I ran out like a mad thing, over the field, right on Zelda’s heels. When I got to the place, I saw Gordle was standing there with one end of the rope that was looped high around a branch. The other end was tied in a loose loop around June’s neck.
    “You got to tighten it,” I heard June say clearly, “before you hoist me up.”
    I rushed forward. I flung off the noose. I grabbed Gordie’s ear and I rapped his hind end. For good measure I grabbed Aurelia and licked her good, too. When I’d ‘finished I threw them down and stood staring at them, panting and furious.
    “Do you know what you almost did?” I screamed.
    “She wanted us to hang her,” Gordie said. “We were playing.
    She stole the horse.”
    “She told us to,” Aurelia said. “She said where to put the rope.
    Their lies maddened me.
    “I’ll show you where to put the rope,” I yelled. I was going to knot it and use it again on them, when I heard a dry little sound, a tearless weeping sound, from June, and I turned.
    She was standing upright, tall and bone-thin and hopeless, with the rosary wrapped around her hand as it is wrapped around the hands of the dead.
    “You ruined it.” Her eyes blinked at me, dry, as she choked it out.
    “I stole their horse. So I was supposed to be hanged.”
    I gaped at her.
    OIL.
    “Child,” I said, “you don’t know how to play. It’s a game, but if they hang you they would hang you for real.”
    She put her head down. I could almost have sworn she knew what was real and what was not real, and that I’d still ruined it.
    “You damn old bitch.” I heard, unbelievably, those words muttered under her breath.
    “What?”
    “You damn old bitch,” she said, aloud, again.
    I grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her flying across the field.
    She was light as a leaf. I tossed her in the house. Then I grabbed the jaw and packed a handful of soap flakes in her mouth. None of my children ever called me a bad name before.
    She spat and bubbled.
    “Damn old chicken!” she gasped again. Looking at her face, strained and wild, sick and greening on the soap, I had to wonder if she knew what she was saying. Was her mind shot? The other children were gaping at the door, satisfied with horror, thrilled with her punishment.
    “Chores!” I said. They vanished )in a whirl of clothes and flying hair.
    Then I set June down in front of me and closely watched her.
    Brave as me, that was June. The soap flakes surely gagged her.
    But she spat them carefully into the dishcloth I put in her hands.
    She wouldn’t look at me.
    “Look at me,” I said.
    I turned her head toward me and looked in her sorrowful black eyes. I looked a long time, as if I was falling down a hill. She blinked gravely and returned my stare. There was a sadness I couldn’t touch there. It was a hurt place, it was deep, it was with her all the time like a broke rib that stabbed when she breathed. I took her hand.
    “June Morrissey,” I said, “your mama was my sister.”
    She looked at me, still not speaking.
    “Your mama died,” I said.
    There was a flicker of a lash.
    “You can be my girl and live here.”
    She spoke to me, finally, with no expression. “I don’t care.”
    Maybe she cared and maybe she did not. She stayed shut.
    Nector had no time for any of them then, not him with his slim wages and his chips at the pool hall and home-brewed wine. If I wasn’t feeding children I was chasing Nector down. I knew all the back rooms.
    I’d take money from his hand that was lighting on the bar. I’d leave him nothing. He’d have to come home and beg when he needed more. So I didn’t have much time for any one of the children about then, and I was glad, that summer, when Eli came around.
    Spring and summer, when the furs were thin, we’d see more of Eli around home. He lived in a mud-chink bachelor shack on the other end of the land. He was a nothing-and-nowhere person, not a husband match for any woman, but I had