LaRose

by Louise Erdrich

Ravich thought that something would happen, but not what did happen.

Only when he walked forward to investigate and looked down did he understand that he had killed his neighbor’s son.

Minute by minute, a day passed, two.

she thought Awan’s daughter hesitated and then nearly said the same thing as Zack. You gotta watch him. Emmaline told herself it was because they loved Landreaux, but later on she knew that was only part of it.

He wondered, as he did every day, how he could go on pretending to the people he loved.

Emmaline was a branchy woman, lovely in her angularity. She was all sticks and elbows, knobby knees.

Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life. Or was it the other way around?

He plunged outside, across the lumps of torn earth, and took the road to town. Sure enough, as he rollingly walked, flakes began and he had the impression, maybe it was the drug he’d taken, that he was all of a sudden stuck.

To get the truth, I must become truth. Or at least appear truth-worthy, he decided.

True, his motives were sketchy. Drugs and vengeance. But why quibble with a budding work ethic?

The drum corrected some interior rhythm; a delicious relaxation painted his thoughts, and he slept.

She never got used to the bells, but she got used to other children coming and going. They died of measles, scarlet fever, flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that did not have a name.

In forty years the tracks would carry mile-long black steel sausage cars full of fracked oil—the trains wouldn’t stop until they blew up or reached a port.

In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships.

She learned, like her mother, how to hide that she had tuberculosis.

All of them learned two languages, four levels of math, the uses of plants, and to fly above the earth.

What her father said made no sense. That can’t be, she said. It is true, he said. Then he repeated the words she had forgotten and remembered many times since she was young. She was stolen. He patted the pile of papers, looked straight at her. Daughter, it is all right here.

Flower, LaRose. LaRose had some use, first of all, in Dr. Haniford Ames’s research. Letters from Dr. Ames politely refusing Wolfred’s requests attested to the value of her body in the name of science.

Ames, according to the lawyer, had no right to take LaRose on the road as an illustration for his scientific lectures on the progress of tuberculosis.

They glanced at him and acted like relatives who suddenly notice you.

In one of the presences he could see traces of the four-year-old picture he had seen sometimes in Nola’s hand. It was Dusty, his age now.