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Crown of Thorns

Summary: Crown of Thorns

This story uses a third-person point of view with a focus that shifts from Gordie Kashpaw, introduced as June’s husband in “The World’s Greatest Fishermen” to Sister Mary Martin, one of the nuns from Sacred Heart Convent. It begins in Eli’s kitchen where Gordie visits, already drunk and craving more alcohol even at 6AM. Gordie started drinking a month after June died in 1981 and has not stopped. He’s in trouble, sick, despairing, and lacking. He walks home and calls Royce who reluctantly offers to deliver bottles of wine on credit. Gordie drinks the wine and passes out until night falls. He calls out June’s name and then wishes he hadn’t, for Marie said that if you call out the dead, they might come. In a fright, Gordie plugs in appliances that make noise, but in the bathroom, he sees June’s bloody, pale face in the mirror. When Gordie plugs in the toaster, the appliance short circuits and creates a flash of light. Suddenly, June appears before him, making the bed and straightening perfume bottles.

In a frenzy, Gordie jumps into his car and takes off down the road. He pauses to sleep when he realizes how sick he is but then continues to town to get more alcohol. Gordie hits a deer. Since he’s forgotten the key to the trunk, he puts the carcass in the back seat, hoping to trade it for a bottle. Gordie’s shaking and sick, but something in the backseat catches his eye. The deer is alive, sitting upright, and Gordie’s eyes meet hers in the rearview mirror. The deer sees right through him. Gordie grabs a crowbar from under the seat and hits her between the eyes, killing her. He then completely loses his senses as he thinks that he’s just killed June.

The perspective shifts to Sister Mary Martin de Porres in the convent who is dreaming of bathing in her home in Lincoln. She wakes and goes downstairs to assemble and play her clarinet, something she does when she has trouble sleeping. Mary Martin imagines a tree shaped like a candelabra and jots down music that she hears in her mind. Hours pass. She hears a knock at the door and sees a man outside. It is Gordie. He is drunk and says he needs to make a confession, weeping and pounding his head on the window frame. Gordie confesses that he’s killed his wife with a crowbar. He lights a cigarette. Mary Martin asks to see his dead wife and follows Gordie to the car, passing through the chapel on her way. At the car, she expects to see a woman but sees a deer. At first, she laughs, then she weeps and crawls into the car to embrace the dead doe. As morning breaks, Mary Martin hears Gordie crying loudly. When she moves toward him, he runs into the woods. When the tribal police arrive, they hear him howling in the fields. 

Analysis: Crown of Thorns

Beginning with its title, “Crown of Thorns” is full of Catholic imagery. The deer resurrects in the back seat, and Erdrich writes, “[the deer] saw how he’d woven his own crown of thorns,” a reference to the crown of thorns that the Romans make Jesus wear when He is crucified to mock the claim that He is King of the Jews. Since Gordie has made his own crown, these words suggest that he deserves his punishment. He imagines June’s white panties glowing with her dress hiked up, like the crucified Jesus’s white loincloth. Soon, the setting changes to the Catholic convent where Sister Mary Martin imagines a tree from her childhood as a candelabra at the altar of the Blessed Virgin. When Gordie asks for a confession and tells his story, Mary Martin gets pulled into his altered state and begins to cry at the news of his dead wife. She passes through the chapel on her way outside, trying to calm herself by genuflecting and making the sign of the cross, but the gestures offer her no comfort. Mary Martin crawls into the car with the deer in an almost passionate embrace, weeping as she does. This nun, unlike Sister Leopold, is empathetic and compassionate.

Many stories in Love Medicine use alcoholism as a motif, but in this one, it takes center stage. Gordie suffers from full-blown, late-stage alcoholism. He tremors and sweats, needing more and more to drink, feeling sicker as time passes. Gordie refuses food and coffee from Eli. He begs a friend to deliver him wine on credit. Gordie’s hallucinations are the result of this condition. He turns on appliances to create noise to distract him, but he goes too far. When the toaster short circuits and creates a bright light, the stimulus is too much for him, and he completely loses his sense of reality. After the deer resurrects, Gordie’s perception descends into a nightmare. Other characters in Love Medicine drink heavily, and many get drunk, but no others have fallen this far into this disease.

The story furthers the recurring idea that the dead come back in unusual and often disturbing ways. Here, June returns home as a vision, albeit a drunken one, appearing bloodied, thin, and pale, like a corpse, recalling her actual death and foreshadowing that of the deer. Gordie holds himself accountable for her return because he has called her name in his sleep, a superstition held by his grandmother. Or is there truth to this mystical belief? Gordie also feels directly responsible for her death, as he used to hit her. If June returns, she will not be happy with him. Perhaps Erdrich suggests that the dead do return, as memories, shame, guilt, visions, sounds of nature, or even ghosts. For example, at the end of “The Plunge of the Brave,” Nector sees a vision of Marie when she was fourteen, glowing and powerful, and Marie is not even dead. Rather his vision is one of Marie’s ghostly past self.

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