LaRose

by Louise Erdrich

I mean, it’s wrong, but I get it. She’s holding him hostage because she wants my attention. She wants me to be like, Oh, Emmaline, how are you, how is your project, your big deal, your this, your that, your girls that Maggie likes so much? How generous you are, Emmaline, what a big-time traditional person to give your son away to a white man and almost white sister who is just so pitiful, so stark raving. So like her mother that Marn who had the snakes. People never forget around here. And they will never forget this either. It will be Emmaline Iron the good strong whaddyacallit, Ogema-ikwe. The woman who forever stuck by that big load Landreaux and even straightened him out so he could, so he could . . . I’m just saying I would kill him for you. I see your face when you’re chopping wood. I’d kill him for you if it wasn’t for LaRose. So their damn unbelievable plan worked its wonder because now I’m better.

She looked over his shoulder. The crossbeam black oak. The rope gone. Gone.

And then they both went back and farther back, to the beginning, where there was nothing else, no bad things happened, where there was no child to grieve, no loss, no danger,

And why couldn’t she just see the peace and glory in it anyway? Why did she have to think of all the dead and one fine day herself among them, sifting through bright air? She wouldn’t do it. The rope was gone! How? Don’t ask. No, no, of course. Not now. LaRose told her how much he needed her. Maggie watched over her. She could feel it. She had a new life. Still, she had to think about it sometimes, a little, it wasn’t wrong, was it? Just to fall endlessly and rise forever on soft currents of warm air stirred by bodies of the living. There was nothing wrong with giving over to the melty swoon of it, the null. There was nothing wrong with having more in common with the dust than with her husband, with Peter, was there?

Maggie still had the stone LaRose had pressed into her hand when he left. It was on her bedside table. She didn’t want it there, or anywhere. She had total responsibility for Nola, and she was weary.

They won’t let him come back to me. He’s my only son. Am I too crazy, Maggie? Is there something wrong with me? Is that why? I love him so much. There’s nothing else in my life. Nothing else. Well. Maggie turned herself off. She spoke in a cool, careful voice. Dad loves you. I love you. Mom. You have us.

Maggie’s teeth clenched her words back. She didn’t say that she was sorry, but she was sorry. She was sorry that she couldn’t do the right thing. Sorry that she couldn’t do what her mother needed done. Sorry she couldn’t fix her. Sorry, sometimes, that she had come across her mother in the barn. Sorry she had saved her. Sorry sorry sorry that she thought that. Sorry she was bad. Sorry she wasn’t grateful every moment for her mother’s life. Sorry that LaRose was her mother’s favorite, although he was Maggie’s too. Sorry for thinking how sorry she was and for wasting her time with all this feeling sorry. Before what happened with her mother, Maggie had never been sorry. How she wished she could be that way again.

He knew his daughter. He remembered the years of teacher conferences. The teachers were wrong. She was not disturbed. High-spirited. That was it. She was too high-spirited for their dull expectations of girls.

And then she had roughly shaken him and when he dared look into her eyes he saw: together they were awake.

Landreaux thought about the Fentanyl patches kept in the back of the bathroom drawer. They were for Ottie’s unhealable stumps. Sit tight, said Landreaux to himself. He gripped the pipe bowl and watched his knuckles whiten until the need, the need, the need passed down a level, which was the dangerous moment when he would think he had conquered the need but that sly part of him could bypass the conviction. The desire, the shame, the fear that stopped his breath was settling. He had been infected with feelings and his body held them like a live virus. But he could turn them off, go to sleep again, find safety in a self-compelled oblivion. He put the stone to his forehead until he felt safe. He took a deep breath. That erratic thing in him had settled down. He talked it down some more.

Snow’s approval of something that her mother did had a strange effect on Maggie. Her stomach seemed to float inside her body. Yet there was a jealous itch in her brain. She looked at Snow, at the elegant way she held her mayonnaise-smelling head, the slim flex of her shoulders, the perfectly layered T-shirts. She needed Snow to understand. My mother actually doesn’t like me, you know, said Maggie. She loves LaRose. Snow’s eyebrows drew together, her lips parted; she stared into Maggie’s face. Just when Maggie was about to shoot her mouth off, say something tough, swear to stop what she saw in Snow’s eyes might turn to pity, Snow reached an arm around Maggie’s shoulders and said, Oh shit, baby-girl, we gotta stick together.

It’s a fact of life, said Snow. We call her out on it all the time. She doesn’t get it. Hollis and Coochy, they’re tight. And we got each other, me, Josette. And, hey. She rocked Maggie toward her comically. We got you covered too.

He admired it from every angle. He praised the marigolds. He didn’t tell her that the first frost would kill them off and they wouldn’t come back the second year. Or that planting seeds was useless in the fall. But he wondered how it was she didn’t know that. Why hadn’t she picked up on these pieces of knowledge in her life? The air was warming, but the spindly plants with their leaves yellowing already were doomed.

she remembered what Snow had said about Hollis liking her. Which was disturbing.

Oh that boy, oh that boy, she whispered. He’s made of good ingredients. Maybe, after all, your Emmaline stepped out on Landreaux.

The beings who might bring our stories to the lowest levels of the earth, to the underwater lions and the giant snakes and other evil beings, they have to be froze in the ground, sleeping.

A man who will do that will do anything, said Ignatia. I should know. Her face screwed into a wink.

Gossip ruled the night shift. Not mean gossip, like at the Elders Lodge, just valuable updates.

He didn’t tell his own stories, he just encouraged others. He didn’t make himself obvious in any way.

A little girl froze to death because she couldn’t get back into the house where her mother was passed out. Although she was pronounced dead at the scene, a doctor CPR’d and warmed her blood and brought her back from the spirit world. Now the girl knew things, like that other kid, LaRose.

Are you saying . . . Maggie’s voice is low . . . are you saying she wanted to hang herself because of how mean I was? Course not. But you were. I was a bitch. I am a bitch. That’s what they call girls like me. Not so far, I mean, at this school. There’s bitchier bitches here. But it will happen.

No, you’re just tough. You gotta be.

All is quiet. Falling asleep, Maggie thinks about LaRose. She thinks about him every night. He calms her down. He is her special, her treasure, she doesn’t really know what he is—hers to love.

His question makes her sick. She thought she was over it, but turns out she’s been holding a pool of slime in her body. Now it seeps from her pores, a light film. Are there tears? She wipes her face. Damn. It still gets to her. And they remember, those guys.

I’m not gonna kill them exactly, but yeah, now I’m stronger.

It’s over. Over! It does not affect me. Besides, they’re kind of brutal. They’re mean assholes. Promise you’re going to leave them alone.

You know I work out with Father Travis. I have my green belt now.

As she worked, Nola’s daily ration of sorrow dissipated into thousands of small items—the

magazines, it seemed that in righting the tiny things of life she was gaining control of herself, perhaps at a molecular level, for she was made up of all this junk, wasn’t she?

Nola heard him talking, or rather, having a conversation.

Don’t use that one, Dusty.

She heard everything. An epic battle between light and darkness. Forms passing through the material of time. Character subverting space. The gathering and regathering. Shapes of beings unknown merging deeply with the known. Worlds fusing. Dimensions collapsing. Two boys playing.

When the fire was burning hot, she pushed in the green chair.

Whenever she was alone, tears had filled her eyes. No drug had helped, and even LaRose had not helped at first. But after listening to him play with Dusty yesterday, she woke this morning and got out of bed before she knew she’d done it.

later this morning her old self stirred.

worlds were aligned, as with the actions of the action figures. Because the fabric between realities, living and dead, was porous not only to herself. This pass-between existed. LaRose went there too. She was not crazy after all. Just maybe more aware, like LaRose was, like everybody said he was. Special. So...

No, she’d just have chickens, she thought, staring into the flames. That was all the death she would be able to bear. Slow down, she counseled herself. You have time to live now. She looked around, behind her, toward the woods.

Ojibwes have a song for everything. This was Romeo’s lock-picking song. He sang beneath his breath as he unlocked a hospital file cabinet with an unbent paper clip. It is truly wonderful, he thinks, that such precious information is considered secure when protected by a lock so jiggly, and cheap-john enough to break.

Funny the trust that resides in him as a recovering alcoholic. Everybody loves that recovery shit, he thinks, as he slides out the paper he needs and replaces the file just in case anybody thinks to look for it although nobody ever will, as this was considered an open-and-shut sort of thing, a tragic accident.

In the olden days, there had been a chance. When he was considered smart.

He’s not high, just living with that memory.

I am not just a scabbed-over pariah. People should know.

He shoves away the document, the black bag, the responsibility that he has assumed.

Then suddenly, halfway into a dream, he gets it.

There is more than they dare say. More the carotid than the femoral, more tha...

Behind all the flimsy bits of pretend truth there must be a real truth so terrible it would cause a stock market crash. But what if that truth is some kind of bubble truth? What if behind the truth, there is nothing but a heap of pride or money or just stuff?

What if there is a use-by date on a heap of war stuff?

Was there a Polish God? The God of sausage and pierogi. A mystical, shrewd, earth-dwelling God who always took things hard. His parents’ God, the one they’d left him with not long after he was ordained. Having seen him back into his life, they’d felt that it was all right to leave, he’d guessed, because bam bam, a stroke, a fatal disease, and they were out of existence. You should stop making Gods up, imagining them as a human would imagine a God, he says to himself, again. Address your prayers to the nothingness, the nonfigurative, abstract, indifferent power, the ever-so-useful higher power. Talk to the unknowable. The ineffable author of all forms. Father Travis finally dozes thinking of all the trees, all the birds, all the mountains, all the rivers, all the seas, the love, all the goodness, all the apple blossoms falling on the wind, then the dust of the world swirling up and falling, the stillness on the waters before it all began.

They have not forgotten Maggie, but it’s different with her. She beat on them! Back then, they respected her. Now when they think about it, they’d like to kind of dominate her. Show her. They got big and she stayed spindly. The way it goes. But then, she’s unpredictable and quick. Her nut kicks now living on in legend. Buggy had to get some outpatient surgery.

Bummer though it is, Maggie is off-limits unless one of them gets ridiculously high. They hardly even talk about her, except for sometimes, in low voices, wondering if she ever told anyone about what they did. It didn’t go too far, anyway. Nothin’ nothin’ really. We never crossed, you know, a line there. For sure. No line was crossed. Was it? Dude, we hardly touched her. She just got mad for no real fucken reason! Will you guys get off it? That was so long ago. Nobody remembers. Nobody cares. Anyway, says Buggy, she wanted it and she still wants it. The other boys are silent, taking in this line of reasoning. They all nod, except Brad, who stares off into the air like he hasn’t heard them. Though he has for sure heard what they said, he is Christian, and that doesn’t sound right at all.