The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

Tetragrammaton,

TheTetragrammatonis the four-letter Hebrew theonym יהוה, the name of God in the Hebrew Bible.

She wasn’t drunk very often. She did think that if she spent much time with Gary, though, she’d have to have a bottle handy.

‘I just don’t like the way everybody acts. So I’m manifesting my difference.’

He missed the lightness of their early days.

She loved Hugo with that superb kind of love a mother has for a male child, a love that is deeper and more pure for knowing that he’ll more than likely turn out a fool.

‘And then we’ll go to all of the places in the books. And have adultery.’ ‘Don’t you commit adultery?’ ‘As in commit to, or as in a sin?’ ‘Both.’ ‘Right.’

One reason he had become a priest was the feeling of comfort these high ceilings gave him. There was room up there for thought, for memory, for prayer, for emotion.

He had many rigid sleep preparations and every so often he added another.

Waking up during the night would ruin the next day.

And so love dies, Crystal thought, pulled down to earth by the tedious weight of a partner’s habits.

She stepped into the living room and was arrested by the beauty of the massive clouds lowering in the windows, a phantom drift of rain sweeping the horizon.

It had taken sleep to help her realize how inhuman, maybe even violent, an extremely soundproofed new house was.

She missed the sound of the wind in the eaves and how she used to read or fall asleep listening to its muttering and moaning, buffeting and pushing, scraping against the siding, making the walls and windows feel alive.

‘Better money in the oil fields,’ he said, out loud, thinking of his next move. ‘But there won’t be blueberry crumble.’

These little dogs had been invented many centuries ago for rich people who had servants to deal with their waste.

But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

The bicyclist hooked reflective sunglasses behind his ears, fastened on his helmet, fiddled with the gears, pulled on padded gloves, and at last climbed onto his bicycle. He began to ride with a trace of that intense self-important air professional bikers emit.

After all, what with the CEOs of banks getting millions of dollars in bonuses instead of arrested and thrown in jail, who cared?

Her skull felt too tight for her brain and her heart too big for her chest. That I should be alive, she thought, with everything to live for, and all this boundless sky.

A weed is just a plant that grows in the wrong place, and Crystal decided that if she had any sympathy for Martin, that feeling was a weed.

It was where he figured things out, had emotions, loved his place on earth, worshipped the sky.

And she liked thinking of the time he’d called her ‘duckling’ in Estonian. The word pardipoeg, they both agreed, was an adorable word.

‘Men. Why do we let them tie us in knots?’