The Need to Return Home

Now she was in the bedroom pulling the sheets off the bed and arranging her perfume bottles. She was coming for him. He lurched for the door. His car key. Where was it? Pants pocket. He slipped through the door and fell down the stairs somehow pitching onto the hood of the Malibu parked below.

Some characters in Love Medicine strive to return home, but others flee home and what it represents. In this scene from “The Crown of Thorns,” the ghost of Gordie’s dead wife, June, appears in his home, frightening him so that he runs away. He believes that June returns home to take revenge on the husband who abused her. The hallucination of June is a perverted homecoming, one that represents Gordie’s inescapable guilt. It pushes him out the door and into his car, where he will experience a dark epiphany in a reversal of coming home. He drives farther and farther from home and sanity until, at the end of the story, he is “howling in the open fields,” the very antithesis of home.

    ‘You’re gonna make it this time,’ I said. ‘Home free.’
    ‘No,’ he said, stretching his arms out, evidently feeling better, ‘I won’t ever really have what you’d call a home.’

This exchange between Lipsha and his father, Gerry, happens in the novel’s final pages, in the story titled “Crossing the Water.” Lipsha has agreed to drop Gerry near the Canadian border so that he can escape arrest once again. Lipsha realizes that Gerry is right, that his father, a serial convict, could not go back to a place where he was known. For Gerry, prison is the opposite of home, and his repeated escapes represent his quest for home, but he can never really reach home completely. Gerry is constantly running, looking behind his shoulders, never at peace. This contrasts with his son, who completes his quest and returns to the reservation. In Love Medicine, there is integrity in both the return home and the quest for home. Some individuals are perpetually seeking home, and others achieve it. Lipsha and his father, Gerry, represent both possibilities.

It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home.

These final words of the novel in “Crossing the Water” bring Lipsha and readers home and bring the novel back to its beginning. Lipsha has just released his father, Gerry, to Canada and freedom, but he has also connected with him in a deep and fulfilling way. By returning to the reservation with the car that he won from King by cheating at poker, a car King purchased with June’s insurance money, Lipsha brings his mother, June, home. The Firebird is a symbol of June’s sons’ connection to their mother. King’s connection to his mother is now Lipsha’s, which has been missing from his life since childhood. The simplicity of the language here mirrors the pure simplicity of the act: a clear morning, a good road, and crossing the turbulent waters of the past.

The Effects of Family Dysfunction and Domestic Abuse

Between my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis. When it broke out it was almost a relief.

These are some of the first words of Albertine Johnson’s in “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” when she recalls the strained relationship she has with her mother, Zelda. When the letter arrives telling her that Aunt June’s funeral had already happened, Albertine is studying a textbook section called “Patient Abuse,” a title that holds a double meaning for her: one meaning for a nursing student, the other for a Kashpaw. Albertine suggests that abuse is not always swift and physical, like a blow to the face or a stab with a fork. Abuse can be a slow process of wearing down, like the stones and pebbles so often imagined in the novel. The comparison she makes here to a deadly disease is an apt one, for abuse can seethe for years, invisible under the surface until suddenly turning deadly.

His hands remembered things he forced his mind away from—how they flew out from his sides in rage so sudden that he could not control the force and speed of their striking. He’d been a boxer in the Golden Gloves. But what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June.

Gordie’s descent into an alcohol-induced psychosis, as detailed in “Crown of Thorns,” complete with delirium, tremors, hallucinations, and episodes of unconsciousness, comes in part from the guilt he feels about mistreating his wife, June. He recalls the damage his hands did as he holds a can of beer whose crushed shape he compares to that of a woman’s waist and torso. Early in the novel, the still alive June carries a doorknob in her purse, probably to protect herself. She carries it in her pocket as she leaves the restroom, “ready for him now.” Here, Gordie separates himself from his hands that he cannot control to deny responsibility, but in his heart, he knows that his abuse contributed to his divorce and eventually to his wife’s death. Her niece, Albertine, observes her aunt’s slow deterioration in her on-again, off-again marriage. Albertine observes in the novel’s first story, “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” that June broke, little by little, into someone with sagging shoulders, ragged nails, her clothes full of “safety pins and hidden tears.”

A note that sounded childish even to the child was in the voice. Spoons, bowls, ashtrays, and bottles clinked together. That was not so bad. The bad part was his big voice ripping out, then getting childish. His mother screamed.

In Part 1 of “Crossing the Water,” the young child, Howard (King Junior) Kashpaw, describes what he hears in the other room. Howard’s safe place is in their bathroom, watching women in blue robes carrying jars on their heads on the wallpaper. The women on the walls are calm and steady. They walk in single file in seamless gowns, the opposite of what is on the other side of the door. This quotation suggests the toll that domestic violence and abuse takes on young children. Howard is a perceptive and precocious child who skips kindergarten because he can already read. The police have arrested his father, King, before, and later in the story, Howard opens the door thinking that police have arrived to arrest King again. He knows that opening the door may have dire consequences for him because he lays on the floor playing dead after the police leave. It’s as if he wants his father to be arrested to protect his mother, Lynette, who is a comfort to him.

Resisting Assimilation and Land Loss

Nector was rarely home then. He worked late or sneaked to gamble. We’d roast the birds and make a high pile of their twig bones in the middle of the table. Eli would sing his songs. Wild unholy songs. Cree songs that made you lonely. Hunting songs used to attract deer or women. He wasn’t shy when he sang them.

These are Marie’s words in “The Beads.” Whereas Nector was educated off the reservation, his brother Eli stayed home and learned the old ways. Marie finds the old ways wild and attractive. In fact, she has an intimate moment with Eli while her husband Nector is gone, but she resists the temptation to be adulterous. Like everyone on the reservation, Marie is caught between two worlds, the Native American one and the white one. Eli represents the woods and the wilderness. Nector represents working for whites and sinking into their sins of gambling, womanizing, and drinking. The birds that they eat on this night are mud hens, tiny black greasy birds that no white person would even want to eat let alone know where to find or how to shoot. Eli teaches June the ways of the woods, how to carve, track, birdcall, and speak softly. More than any other character, Eli perpetuates the old ways and keeps them alive.

If we’re going to measure land, let’s measure it right. Every foot and inch you’re standing on, even if it’s on the top of the highest skyscraper, belongs to the Indians. That’s the real truth of the matter.

These words belong to Lulu Lamartine in “The Good Tears.” Despite her modern appearance, Lulu is loyal to the old ways and has her own ideas about numbers and measurements. She believes that the white ways of counting and measuring are just ploys to make nature serve their own selfish purposes. Her husband, Henry, never formally filed on or purchased the land their house sits on, so it can be reclaimed by the tribe. The tribe officials claim that they’ll move the house, but Lulu doesn’t trust them, observing that the Chippewa once lived east of the Great Lakes, and now look where they are. She refuses to move one foot farther west and rejects Nector because of his role in what the council is doing to her. Lulu accuses the government of throwing crumbs on the floor, expecting the council to lick them up. Hers are the most accusatory words in the novel toward not only the federal government but also the tribal council who bows to it.

Our Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least they come around. They’ll do you a favor if you ask them right. You don’t have to yell. But you do have to know, like I said, how to ask in the right way. That makes problems, because to ask proper was an art that was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground.

In “Love Medicine,” Lipsha recalls the time that he went to Mass with Nector Kashpaw who yelled the prayers very loudly so the Catholic God would hear. Lipsha is pulled to the old ways and having the healing touch is part of that pull. Like Lulu, he sees the old way as the “right way,” and the Catholic way, the new way and the white way, as wrong. Although the Chippewa gods, such as tricky Nanabozho or the water monster, Missepeshu, can be good and bad, they stick around. They live among people, not separate from them. They inhabit the natural world rather than in a human-built church or high up in the sky. Although the Old Testament Catholic God showed up occasionally, he doesn’t come around anymore. Lipsha equates this Catholic God with the government: an entity whose ears are stopped and who cannot be relied upon for anything.

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