The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

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 a forgetful fury obliterated the exhaustions of their love, which was like no other love on earth, he had always insisted. Quite recently, Crystal had decided otherwise. It was exactly the same as most marriages that included an utterly self-absorbed man.

although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now.

So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo. Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.

The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.

Practically everything she and the Geists did, and even her mother’s job, was destroying what she had just witnessed, the joinery of creation.

It was a weakness, she thought later. This responding to a man who asks for approval had been her downfall in so many ways.

The cult had rejected him for being a Catholic because they didn’t accept people who already belonged to a cult.