LaRose (11 page)

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

The government? They were going for extermination then. That
Wizard of Oz
man, yes? You have his clipping.

LaRose drew out bits and scraps of paper, newsprint.

Here.

T
HE
A
BERDEEN
S
ATURDAY
P
IONEER
, 1888

BY FRANK BAUM

. . . the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are Masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit is broken, their manhood effaced, better that they die than live as the miserable wretches they are.

1891

BY FRANK BAUM

. . . our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth.

Oh well, said Mrs. Peace, here we are. It’s a wonder.

This ain’t Oz, said her mother.

Looks like Oz down in your graveyard. All those green glowy lights.

No poppies there in winter.

I’ve got better stuff in here.

Mrs. Peace rummaged around. Under all of the papers and mementos in the rose tin, she kept her Fentanyl patches—white with green lettering, in translucent pouches. She was extremely careful with their use. She was supposed to keep ahead of the pain, but she didn’t like to get too cloudy. She let the pain crank her up until she could think of nothing else. Her patches gave the medicine out in a slowly timed release. The amount she took now would have killed her years ago.

Exterminate or educate.

Just take the pain away, she said.

It was good we became teachers so we could love those kids.

There was good teachers, there was bad teachers. Can’t solve that loneliness.

It sets deep in a person.

Goes down the generations, they say. Takes four generations.

Maybe finally worked itself out with the boy.

LaRose.

Could be he’s finally okay.

It’s possible.

The recliner went plushier. The air dripped with sound. Watery streams of soft noise rushed along her sides. She put out her arms. Her mother took her hands. They drifted. This is how she visited with her mother, who had died of tuberculosis like her mother and grandmother. It was a disease of infinite cruelty that made a mother pass it to her children before she died. Mrs. Peace had not died of her mother’s tuberculosis. She had been in the sanitarium in 1952, the year isoniazid and its various iterations astonishingly cured the incurable.

I was sure that I would die like you. So I tried not to get attached to anything or anyone. You are numb for years, she said to her mother, then you begin to feel. At first it is a sickening thing. To feel seems like having a disease. But you get used to sensations over time.

You were saved for a reason, eh?

Those kids, said Mrs. Peace. To knit with them, make them powwow clothes, bring them up dancing. Have our little tea parties where I put just a little coffee in their mugs of milk.

Do you ever see them now?

From time to time, the ones that lived. Landreaux, of course. And that Romeo comes around. I hear about lots of others. Successful. Not.

The two bobbed in space, still holding hands, and her mother cried out, Even I want to give you all the love I never could! I hated to die and leave you. How good that we can be together now!

NOLA DRAGGED MAGGIE
to Holy Mass. While kneeling, Maggie slumped, resting her buttocks impudently on the edge of the pew. Her mother elbowed her, and Maggie slid out of reach. The sly movement triggered Nola and she struck out. In one motion, she
backhanded Maggie and clawed her back into place. She’d moved with such swift assurance that Maggie gaped and plunked down. Nobody else around them seemed to notice, though Father Travis’s eye flicked as he walked up to the pulpit.

Father Travis had long ago stopped giving sermons. He just told stories. Today he told how Saint Francis preached to the birds, the fish, the faithful rabbit, and then was called in to rescue an Italian village from a ravenous wolf.

Father Travis walked out into the middle of the aisle and acted out the meeting between Saint Francis and the wolf. He described the Wolf of Gubbio, monstrous large and enthusiastic about eating people. When Saint Francis arrived at the village, he followed the wolf’s tracks into the woods and then confronted the wolf. This wolf had never been challenged, and was surprised that Saint Francis was not afraid. The wolf listened to Saint Francis and agreed to stop marauding the village. The wolf sealed its promise by placing its paw in St. Francis’s hand.

When a person speaks calmly and exudes peace, even a wolf may listen, said Father Travis.

Maggie thought, Yeah, but sometimes you have to bite.

Saint Francis brought the wolf back to the people of Gubbio and extracted mutual promises. They would feed the wolf. Every day it could make the rounds of the houses and receive a handout. In return, it would stop attacking people. Again, the wolf put its paw in Saint Francis’s hand, this time in front of the villagers. The wolf swore an oath by rolling over on its back and then bounding up on its hind legs and howling. So there was peace. The wolf died of old age. The people of Gubbio buried it beneath a tombstone and mourned its passing.

Maggie held her fury back because she wanted to hear the story, but when Father Travis finished, she moved away again, this time safely out of her mother’s reach.

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

EVERYONE KNEW THE
stray rez dog who’d lived in the woods was Peter’s dog now. But the dog slipped off his dog run and made a polite visit to Landreaux’s place one afternoon. So when Landreaux had to go take his shift at the housing complex, where Awan waited for attention, he coaxed the dog into the back of his car, intending to drop him off at the Ravich house.

Landreaux meant to leave the dog at the door, that’s all. But Peter answered, and after he took the dog back he abruptly spoke.

We should finish that conversation.

I’m late, said Landreaux.

Won’t take long, said Peter. Can you come in? Five minutes?

Landreaux hunched his shoulders, made to kick off his boots at the door.

Nah, don’t worry, said Peter.

Landreaux sat down at the table, touched the edge. He didn’t want to speak, to bring up the thing he dreaded. He could feel the tension bubbling up inside, the quickened pump of his heart.

The agreement, whatever we call it, Peter started.

Landreaux just nodded, staring at his fingers.

The question is, said Peter.

Landreaux’s heart just quit.

The question is, said Peter. What’s it doing to him?

Landreaux’s heart started beating again.

What’s it doing to him, he weakly said.

He’s sad, said Peter. Missing his family. Can’t understand. You’re right there down the road. I catch his face in the rearview when we pass. He’s so quiet, just looking at his old house.

This was all Peter could stand to tell. About the muffled crying, nothing. About LaRose beating his head with his hands, nothing. About his secret questions whispered only to Peter,
Where is my real mom?
, he couldn’t tell.

Landreaux took in what Peter did say, then spoke. Feel like I used
him to take it off me. Traditional ways. Fuck. This isn’t the old days. But then again there was reason in it. I wanted to . . .

Landreaux trailed off. Help, thought Peter.

I think it does. I know it does. Help. As long as we’re with LaRose we’re thinking about him, and we love him. He’s a decent boy, Landreaux, you’ve raised him right. Him being with us helps Nola. Helps Maggie. It does help . . . but what’s it doing to him? I mean, he’s holding Nola together. Big job. Meanwhile this is probably tearing Emmaline apart.

Oh, said Landreaux, she hides it.

Nola doesn’t hide it, said Peter. You can see it everywhere. He gestured, jerky with anxiety, around the area—living, dining, kitchen. Both men dropped into their own thoughts. 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. Also in Landreaux’s past there were the buzzers, bed checks, whistles, bells, divided trays, measured days of boarding school. There was the unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.

I can’t move anything, said Peter. She puts it back. She’s got a mental tape measure. She can tell when anything is changed in the slightest. Believe me, she knew we tipped the table over.

Landreaux nodded.

I’d like to . . . switch that off in her, said Peter.

Then felt disloyal. After all, Nola had moved into the Ravich house, fairly new, but also filled with things that his parents and grandparents had owned. Her meticulous care of these objects comforted him.

I mean if she could just let go sometimes, he added.

You’d like her to be happy again, said Landreaux.

Happy? Peter said the word because it was an odd, archaic word. She gets mad at Maggie, that’s the worst, but really, she’s done nothing but try. She’s a good mother. At first I tried to bring LaRose back to you guys. I thought what you did was all wrong, thought she
would get better without him. Then I realized if I brought him back, that would kill her.

Landreaux thought of Emmaline wretchedly bent over in the sweat lodge.

Still, it’s LaRose, said Peter. His breath rasped. His heart sounded in his ears. He knew what he was going to say would make Nola cry in that shrill animal keening way she went out to the barn to do, after the kids were sleeping, hoping she could not be heard. It’s LaRose, said Peter. We have to think of him. We should share him. We should, you know, make things easier between us all.

Oh, said Landreaux.

As if the lid had lifted off his brain he blazed with shock and light. He couldn’t speak. Weakness assailed him and he put his head down on the table. Peter looked down on his parted hair, the long tail of it, the loose power of Landreaux’s folded arms. A sinuous contempt gripped him and he thought of the rapture he would feel for an hour, maybe two hours, after he brought down his ax on Landreaux’s head. Indeed, he’d named his woodpile for his friend, and the mental image was the cause of its growing size. If not for LaRose, he thought, if not for LaRose. Then the picture of the boy’s grief covered his thinking.

After Landreaux had left, Peter lay on the living room carpet, staring at the ceiling fan. Hands on his forehead, stomach whirling with the blades. He wasn’t a man to make friends, and it was hard, this thing with Landreaux. Peter was six foot two, powerful because he worked the farm, but weak, too, in the ankles, in the knees, in the wrists and neck. Wherever one part of his body met up with another part, it hurt. Still, it was his method to suck it up. High school coaches had taught him that. This was his family’s farm before the family died off, except for one now Floridian brother he’d bought out. Peter’s family were Russian-German immigrants, there long enough to have picked buffalo bones off the land.

When he is feeling well, Peter throws LaRose and Maggie in the
air. Falling, they catch the smile on his cool, Slavic face. He rises at 5:00 a.m. and goes to bed at midnight. He works those other jobs, plus the farm, yet there is so much left over. Nola, he met in Fargo. They both went to NDSU and it was a surprise they’d never run into each other in small-town Pluto—a raw little place with a few old buildings, a struggling grocery, some gift shops, a Cenex, and a new Bank of the West. Peter’s family had farmed outside of town and Nola’s mother, Marn, had lived there as a child—they sometimes visited the land she had leased out. Once things became too difficult after Billy Peace died, she had moved with the kids to Fargo. Made them go by their second names because of certain people.