Love Medicine (35 page)

So many things in the world have happened before. But it’s like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it’s a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt-smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. We held each other’s arms, tight and manly, when we got to the border. A windbreak swallowed him up. I didn’t want my lights to show, so I cruised for miles and miles in the soft clear moonlight, slow, feeling the comfortable dark behind me and before.

I didn’t turn the headlights on until I hit the highways. Near dawn, I came to the bridge over the boundary river. I was getting pretty close to home now, so I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge, got out to stretch, and for some reason I remembered how the old ones used to offer tobacco to the water. I looked down over the rail.

It’s a dark, thick, twisting river. the bed is deep and narrow. I thought of June. The water played in whorls beneath me or flexed over sunken cars. How weakly I remembered her. If it made any sense at all, she was part of the great loneliness being carried up the driving current. I tell you, there was good in what she did for me, I know now.

The son that she acknowledged suffered more than Lipsha Morrissey did.

The thought of June grabbed my heart so, but I was lucky she turned me over to Grandma Kashpaw.

I still had Grandma’s hankie in my pocket. The sun flared. I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR LmISE ERDRICH was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954, the eldest of seven children. Her father and mother both taught at the Wahpeton (ND) Indian Boarding School, where she attended primary and secondary school before matriculating to Dartmouth College in 1972 as one of the first group of women admitted to that institution.

Upon her graduation in 1976, His. Erdrich returned to North Dakota to conduct poetry workshops sponsored by the National and State Endowments for the Humanities Poetry in the Schools Program. In 1978 she attended Johns Hopkins University and received an MFA in Creative Writing the following year. She then moved to Boston to become editor of the Boston Indian Council newspaper, The Circle. In 1980 she received a fellowship to the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and in 1981 she was named Writer-in-Residence at Dartmouth’s Native American Studies Program. Her short stories have won widespread praise, appearing in The Atlantic Monthly, His.” Mother Jones, Chicago, and The Paris Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories of 1983, The Pushcart Prize Anthology of 1983, and The 0. Henry Prize Stories of 1985. She also won the first Nelson Algren Award in 1997 and The Society of Magazine Editors’ Award in 1983. Jacklight, a poetry collection, was published in 1984.

In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984, Love Medicine has won the Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Novel from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, the Best First Fiction Award from the Great Lakes College Association, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His. Erdrich’s next novel, The Beet Queen, will be published in 1986.

His. Erdrich now lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Michael Dorris, and their five children. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.