LaRose

by Louise Erdrich

Here, said Maggie, let’s go outside and I’ll kill something to show you.

You must be mean. Nobody just goes and kills a dog for nothing. Your dad went and killed my brother for nothing,

I won’t call you dork if you change my mom from evil, like she is now, into nice. If you can do that? I think they would make a TV show about you.

Do anything she tells you to do, Maggie directed. And eat her cakes. Also, hugs.

You’re boney, he said to Nola. You can feel my skeleton, Nola said. Are you a Halloween lady? he asked carefully. No, she said, I’m not. My mother was a witch. I don’t want to be my mother.

He’d landed in a world of boney women. Even Maggie was boney with her gangly legs. He hadn’t said it, though. Nor had he said that Maggie called her mother evil. Something stopped him. He didn’t know why he just didn’t say everything in his mind anymore. It was like his mouth had a little strainer that only let through pleasant words.

It was like being heart-dead and then heart-alive,

Many times each day, she questioned what they had done.

He glanced around the yards, checking to see if anybody was watching. It was that—the checking—he thought later, that gave it all away. His heart was hidden from his thoughts for days, until he remembered glancing over Emmaline’s shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

Yes, I wasn’t exactly in touch with myself. Also, there’s Nola. She gets mad at Maggie, I think. What if she treats LaRose that way?

When his eyes were shut, Emmaline saw, he was an ordinary man with weather-raked skin and chapped lips.

The Iron girls. Snow, Josette. The Iron Maidens. They were junior high volleyball queens, sister BFFs, heart-soul confidantes to each other and advice givers to their brothers. They were tight with their mom, loose with their dad. With their grandma they got bead-happy and could sew for hours. Snow was going to be the tall, intense one who had trouble concentrating on her schoolwork and whom boys only liked as a friend. She was in eighth grade. Josette was going to be the smart one who despaired about her weight but magnetized clumsy desire among boys whom she liked only as friends. She was in grade seven.

That’s not inspiration, that’s mawkish.

Nobody at school had been very mean. Everybody in their school had something awful happen someplace in their family. Everybody just got sad for everybody, usually, or said tough shit, or if you were a girl maybe you gave a card. There were no cards for what had happened. But one of her girlfriends had beaded Snow a pair of earrings and she knew it was to say what there were no words to say. There were no words to say to their father, either. At least no words they wanted to say.

They’d avoid true feelings because it could go real deep real sudden with their father.

Every time he found himself putting another sack of pancake mix or a shovel on the credit card, he told himself that after Y2K the credit card companies would be so messed up by confusing 2000 with 1900 that chances were his statements would get lost. The credit card companies would vanish, the banking system, crippled, would go back to swapping gold bricks.

THE PARENTS DIDN’T want it, but Christmas came for both families. Nola woke a week before the twenty-fifth, picturing her heart as a lump of lead. It lay so heavy in her chest that she could feel it, feebly thumping, reasonlessly going when she wasn’t interested in its efforts. But Christmas.

closed her eyes now so that she would not see the likeness in Peter. To distract herself, she started humming, switched thoughts to her daughter. The thought of Maggie was complicated, sometimes alive with love. Sometimes heart-thumping fury.

She used to have a laugh like little bells. It had changed, Peter thought. Her laugh had become a jeer, a bark, a series of angry shouts, an outburst. She laughed now when things were sad, not funny.

Nothing. There was silence. Hollis knew that his own dad, Romeo, had dropped him off with Emmaline and Landreaux sometime around Christmas. He’d been five, maybe six, like LaRose. He’d slept in one of the bunks for a while, but liked the blow-up better. He also knew that he’d been born in some sort of house, not a hospital. His memories of his first years were a jumble of sleeping under tables with people’s feet, or better, in a dog bed with a dog, or with some other kids one winter, all wearing their parkas in the bed. There was a salty skin-dirt smell, overlaid with sour weed and clumped hair, that still closed his throat. The smell was on some people, some kids, and he’d back away from it. He took a shower now every day. He washed his clothes. Liked the smell of ironing. The girls teased him, but they liked it too. Being clean wasn’t something he took for granted, or having his own bed. So, no, he didn’t get involved with this LaRose issue. For safety, he just eased away.

So will you give me away if you kill somebody, Mom? That was Josette shouting. Snow stepped forward and slapped Josette, who slapped her back. Emmaline dropped the spoon and slapped them both—she

I want to cut off my hand, wept Emmaline. I never slapped you girls before. We should each cut our hands off, wailed Snow.

They did not trust Hollis or Willard, or even their dad, not to shatter the bottle with their feet. It was like that to live with guys. They just stepped on things, even gifts.

Landreaux had demons, he said. Demons did not scare Randall, but he respected them. It must have been something that happened to me when I was a kid but I can’t remember, Landreaux said. That’s what everybody thinks, said Randall. Like if you suddenly remember what happened, you kill the demon. But it’s a whole hell of a lot more complicated. Going up against demons was Randall’s work. Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?

Evil tried to catch them all. They fought demons, outwitted them, flew.

Randall talked about how people think what medicine people did in the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now, but not magic. LaRose can do these things too, said Randall. He has it in him. He’s stronger than you think. Remember you thought they said he was a mirage?

He ain’t a footnote to your agony, bro. What was he like? Who knew that boy the best, of your family? Landreaux finally answered. LaRose.

Don’t you cry no more. Unless it’s for that kid. Don’t you cry no more for your own pain. You put that cry energy into your family. Into doing good

There are no half sisters,

Still, even after being poached like a frog by Randall, there was no peace. Landreaux felt worse and worse. He mourned LaRose’s stringy arms hugging him, blamed himself for making LaRose his secret, favorite child.

Emmaline gave the quilt to Nola, who thanked her at the door, folded up the blanket, and put it on the highest shelf of a closet. Also, every couple of weeks, Emmaline couldn’t help herself from making the special soup and frybread that her son favored. She put it on Nola’s doorstep or even into Nola’s hands, hoping that LaRose would taste her love in it. Nola tossed it out. Just before Christmas, Emmaline came back with the moccasins. Left them wrapped with LaRose’s name on them. Nola put the moccasins in a plastic box. Stuffed into that container they waited, and Nola feared them, for their woodsmoke scent held the power of creation.

A fuzzy wash of draining sadness covered him.

The new bishop, Florian Soreno, would take a hard-line stance toward all the hot-button issues—this was a red state. Father Travis worked in a blue zone. Reservations were blue dots or blots, voting Democrat. The only Republican he could think of, beside himself, was Romeo Puyat. With a new bishop, Father Travis might get a Dominican with a liberation-theology bent because this bishop might want to punish such a priest by sending him to a reservation.

The glow of candles spiritualized the features of people who drove him nuts.

Then she pushed herself along and pretended around the children that she was really there instead of in the ground.

She seemed delighted, and she was, because if the world did end this would all be over. She would not have to keep pretending to get better. Any chaos that happened wouldn’t be her fault.

same. All right. Peter drank deeply. We’ll never be the same. That doesn’t mean we change, you know, how we are with each other. I still love you.

I still love you, too, she said at last, forcing conviction into her voice, sipping at her wine, then suddenly draining it. More! Nola held out her glass, laughing. After all, what does it matter if we’re the same or not? It’s the end of the world! Let’s toast the end of the world.

They made love with an urgency sweet at first. But as they twined deeper they jolted down into a mean-walled, sour place.

There was no panic. At some point, he put his head down and must have passed out. Dawn was sad, calm, and brimming with debt.

I saw Dusty that day, said the dog in Peter’s mind. I carry a piece of his soul in me. Peter put his big windburned forehead on the dog’s forehead. I’m not crazy, am I? No, said the dog. These are things a normal man might think.

Peter went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He cracked a cold beer. Sitting at the table now, he invited Landreaux to do the same. He did. Landreaux didn’t see himself from the outside the way he normally witnessed his thoughts. Somehow he’d slipped around his thoughts in that moment, and as he sat down he also took a drink. When he did that, his porous brain sponged up the action, and then at a cellular level, the substance.

They finished one beer and started on another. Four or five and Landreaux would start to feel the slide; there would be no going back.

He jumped up and swiftly brought the can to Peter’s temple—not much of a weapon—but Peter wasn’t there. He’d dropped and hit Landreaux in a tackle, tried to pin him, but Landreaux got his knees up and Peter had to lean in to throw a punch, which gave Landreaux a chance to put a headlock on him, roll him, so it went. They smashed the table over, stood up on either side of it, mouths hanging open, eyes locked in shame, panting.

The pain was still balled up in Peter but now more familiar. I could make you into a dirty drunk. I could ambush and blow you away. I could get you somehow but it wouldn’t do the thing I want. Dusty. I dream about him every night.

There was hundreds of children from all over as far as Fort Berthold, so hundreds and hundreds of braids those first years. Where did the braids go?

But with our hair off, we lost our power and we died.

Look at those little children. Those children sacrificed for the rest of us, my view. Tamed in itchy clothes.

These kind of pictures are famous. They used them to show we could become human.

better that they die than live as the miserable wretches they are.