LaRose

by Louise Erdrich

Then he looked at Nola and saw that her face had broken open. All the softness was flowing out. And the greed, too, a desperate grasping that leaned her windingly toward the child.

He and Father Travis were chopping themselves calm, miles apart, stacking heartache.

It almost made him smile to look at the row of tin lockers and realize that behind each numbered door, on the narrow top shelf, there rested a pastel cake.

It was like that to live with guys. They just stepped on things, even gifts. Ojibwe girls, traditionally and now throwback traditionally, were taught from a young age not to step over things, especially boy things. Grandma’s friend Ignatia Thunder, their traditional go-to elder, had told them all that their power might short out the boys’ power. It was sexist, Josette said, another way to control the female. Snow semi-agreed. Emmaline went poker-faced. Maybe the Iron women weren’t a hundred percent with the rule, but they still couldn’t get themselves to forget about it.

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?

Melodrama? That detracts. Vocabulary words! The girls smacked hands. Fine, said Emmaline. I acquiesce.

They raised their glasses in silence. Nola pushed her hair, the slack blond curls, off her face. As they drank they looked into each other’s eyes and saw the strangers who now inhabited the bodies that had together made their son. I wonder who you are now, Nola said. It’s just me, said Peter, the same old me. No it’s not. We’ll never be the 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. His words hung out there in the stillness.

The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.

He was teaching him words for the plates and dishes. He told how to make a spirit dish and how the spirits appreciated when a person noticed them. How the spirits were there in things, all things, and would talk with the Ojibwe. How they came in dreams, and also in the ordinary world,

doesn’t matter.