LaRose

by Louise Erdrich

You gotta watch him. Emmaline told herself it was because they loved Landreaux, but later on she knew that was only part of it.

she leaned over, took his face in her hands, and placed her forehead on his forehead. They closed their eyes as if their thoughts could be one thought.

LaRose helped with all of this—he knew how to do things. He was Landreaux’s little man, his favorite child, though Landreaux was careful never to let anyone know about that.

His parents sang to the beings they had invited to help them, and they sang to their ancestors—the ones so far back their names were lost.

They had seen LaRose floating above the earth. He had put his hand upon their hearts and whispered, You will live. They knew what to make of these images now.

They had resisted using the name LaRose until their last child was born. It was a name both innocent and powerful, and had belonged to the family’s healers. They had decided not to use it, but it was as though LaRose had come into the world with that name.

THAT NIGHT, LAROSE slept between his mother and his father. He remembered that night. He remembered the next night. He did not remember what happened in between.

The black crack between them seemed to reach down forever now. He had not found the bottom yet.

If she cried, her mother cried louder. If she didn’t cry, her mother said she was a coldhearted little animal.

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.

Because her half sister understood her so well, Nola would turn from her, afraid of her, and harden herself against Emmaline.

His love had been a burden no different from hate.

The story would be around him for the rest of his life. He would live in the story. He couldn’t change it.

But Landreaux knew that wasn’t exactly true. LaRose had already changed the story.

I guess it ain’t something you get over, though. You keep on going through it.

His parents had told him, but he still didn’t get it. He had to hear it again and again.

She was overcome by a restless wretchedness.

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.

Every morning, she floated to consciousness on that same disintegrating raft. Many times each day, she questioned what they had done.

It was an old form of justice. It was a story, and stories got to him.

Like any mother, it made her uneasy to see her children feign death.

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.

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.

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

THE PARENTS DIDN’T want it, but Christmas came for both families.

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.

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.

He tried to be jovial but couldn’t. It was in his blood to give off feelings of holiday suspicion, instead of cheer,

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?

people think what medicine people did in the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now, but not magic.

In the car, she put her hand in her pocket and touched a slip of paper upon which she had written You can take him back.

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.

Dawn was sad, calm, and brimming with debt.

I’m not crazy, am I? No, said the dog. These are things a normal man might think.

When a person speaks calmly and exudes peace, even a wolf may listen,

People only listened to the wolf because it ate them. Maggie was certain.

An itchy claustrophobic feeling had been gathering in Landreaux. This feeling was stirred up whenever he entered a house or building that was aggressively neat. He had already felt that here—life consumed by order.

Sometimes her merciless dark eyes gave nothing back. Her face shut. She was a blank wall, fresh painted. He groped to find a secret hinge.

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

Sometimes energy of this nature, chaos, ill luck, goes out in the world and begets and begets. Bad luck rarely stops with one occurrence. All Indians know that. To stop it quickly takes great effort, which is why LaRose was sent.

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

When she was six years old, her teachers started calling Maggie “a piece of work.” But after her brother died, her work came together.

Nola, however, was reassured by her daughter’s compulsion to tear aside the plastic wrap that divides the universes. It was only natural, thought Nola, to live in both.

As for herself, she could luxuriate in tears, she could almost command them into her eyes. She was training herself.

LaRose and LaRose and LaRose going on forever.

For the history of LaRose is tied up in those schools. Yes, we wrote our name in places it would never be found until the building itself was torn down or burned so that all the sorrows and strivings those walls held went up in flames, and the smoke drifted home.

The animals came to LaRose and laid themselves down at his feet. They were drawn to him, knowing they would be saved.

She had raised a monster whom she hated with all the black oils of her heart but whom she also loved with a deadly confused despair.

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?