Love Medicine Read Free

crossed.
    “Probably drank too much,” Mama wrote. She naturally hadn’t thought well of June. “Probably wandered off too intoxicated to realize about the storm.”
    But June grew up on the plains. Even drunk she’d have known a storm was coming. She’d have known by the heaviness in the air, the smell in the clouds. She’d have gotten that animal sinking in her bones.
    I sat there at my table, thinking about June. From time to time, overhead, I heard my landlady’s vacuum cleaner. Through my window there wasn’t much to see-dirt and dead snow and wheels rolling by in the street. It was warm but the grass was brown, except in lush patches over the underground steam pipes on the campus. I did something that day. I put on my coat and went walking down the street until I came to a big stretch of university lawn that was crossed by a steam-pipe line of grass-so bright your eyes ached-and even some dandelions. I walked out there and lay down on that patch of grass, above the ground, and I thought of Aunt June until I felt the right way for her.
    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 A.W.O.L. from army boot camp and never let his face be seen again. All I knew of him L_ —deg was pictures, blond, Weak, and doomed to wander, perhaps as much by Mania’s rage at her downfall as by the uniform. I’d been the one who’d really blocked my mother’s plans for being pure.
    I’d forced her to work for money, keeping books, instead of pursuing tasks that would bring divine glory on her head. I’d caused her to live in a trailer near Grandma so that there would be someone to care for me.
    Later on, I’d provided her with years of grinding grief. I had gone through a long phase of wickedness and run away. Yet now that I was on the straight and narrow, things were even worse between us.
    After two months were gone and my classes were done, and although I still had not forgiven my mother, I decided to go home. I wasn’t crazy about the thought of seeing her, but our relationship was like a file we sharpened on, and necessary in that way. So I threw a few books and some clothes in the backseat of my Mustang. It was the first car I’d ever owned, a dull black hard driven car with rusted wheel wells, a stick shift, and a windshield wiper only on the passenger side.
    All along the highway that early summer the land was beautiful. The sky stretched bare. Tattered silver windbreaks bounded flat, plowed fields that the government had paid to lie fallow.
    Everything else was dull tan-the dry ditches, the dying crops, the buildings of farms and towns. Rain would come just in time that year.
    Driving north, I could see the earth lifting. The wind was hot and smelled of tar and the moving dust.
    At the end of the big farms and the blowing fields was the reservation.
    I always knew it was coming a long way off. Even in the distance you sense hills from t heir opposites-pits, dried sloughs, ditches of cattails, potholes. And then the water. There would be water in the hills when there wasn’t any on the plains, because the hollows saved it, collected runoff from the low slopes, and the dense trees held it, too.
    I thought of water in the roots of trees, brown and bark smelling, cold.

A
    The highway narrowed off and tangled, then turned to gravel with ruts, holes, and tall blue alfalfa bunching in the ditches.
    Small hills reared up. Dogs leaped from nowhere and ran themselves out fiercely. The dust hung thick.
    My mother lives ‘just on the very edge of the reservation with her new husband, B’ornson, who owns a solid wheat farm. She’s lived there about a year. I grew up with her in an aqua-and-silver trailer, set next to the old house on the land my great-grandparents