This week we’ll be discussing the following sections/chapters from LOVE MEDICINE: “Wild Geese,” “The Island,” “The Beads,” and “Lulu’s Boys.” Well, I’m not going to try and cover them all, but we’ll get a good start and leave plenty of room for other comment.
“Wild Geese” is set in 1934, and we meet Nector Kashpaw as a young man–virile, good looking, sure of himself–and as narrator. It’s immediately striking that as narrator he speaks in the present tense. Striking because in the previous section/story, “Saint Marie,” the narrator, Marie Lazarre, tells her story in the past tense–looking back and making sense of things, at least to herself.
Both of these choices are appropriate to the character/narrator. Nector lives very much in the present: he is immediate, impulsive, passionate. He does not look back. He does not try and make sense of the past. No surprise that he is incapable of dealing with the sudden crisis of running into–or being run into by–Marie Lazarre as she plunges down the hill from the convent. She overwhelms him.
As we all know, LOVE MEDICINE is a powerful, moving, often disturbing book. (Oh, okay, I’m going to call it a novel.) But what I love about “Wild Geese” is the humor–it’s hilarious. Here’s this young, studly Native American man. He’s walking up the hill to sell geese he’s shot. They’re heavy and tied to both wrists. He’s hoping to get some cash to spend on Lulu Nanapush, one of the more attractive women he knows. Instead, down plummets, Marie, a scrawny, intense fourteen-year-old from the lowest of low-caste families:
“I lose my balance and pitch over. The geese pull me down. . . .
“There I am on the ground, sprawled and burdened by the geese. . . .
“Her breasts graze my chest, soft and pointed. I cannot help but lower myself the slightest bit to feel them better. And then I am caught. I give way. I cannot help myself, because, to my everlasting wonder, Marie is all tight plush acceptance, graceful movements, little jabs that lead me underneath her skirt where she is slick, warm, silk. I touch her with one hand and in that one touch I lose myself.”
Those damn geese.
So instead of following the trajectory toward Lulu, Nector is caught up with Marie. And so remains for many years, though the triangle with Lulu remains potent and will certainly reignite.
Lulu we meet also in 1934 in the very next section, “The Island.” She has run away from the government school and returns to her uncle Nanapush and his ornery wife Rushes Bear. Lulu is an embodiment of fertility in this novel. She takes multiple lovers–Nector will be just one–and has many children. Her names change according to different family perspective.
Just as important, she represents a meeting place or transition between the ways of the old Ojibwe traditions and the families of the modern world of the reservation, which are so thoroughly interconnected, interpenetrated through blood and sex and religion. Thus, her first lover is known as Moses Pillager. “Known as” because his true name is a secret, hidden by his mother who pretended he was dead to save him from a sickness that decimated much of the tribe. It is Lulu who hunts and traps him, as it were, on his island full of cats and brings him back, briefly, to himself, to the world. By him she has her first child.
Earlier in “The Island” we also discover the source of the novel’s title. Rushes Bear has visited Nanapush one Sunday because she wanted to make love. They have gone at it all day, and in the evening Rushes Bear “walked off, slower and more thoughtful as she moved down the hill, merely brushing the leaves out of her way.”
“‘What’s your love medicine?'” Lulu asks her uncle. “‘She hates you but you drive her crazy.'”
“He lit his pipe of kiniskinnick, thought before he spoke. ‘No clocks. These young boys who went to the Bureau school, they run their love life on white time. Now me, I go on Indian time. Stop in the middle for a bowl of soup. Go right back to it when I’ve got my strength. I got nothing else to do, after all. I’m going to die soon.'”
This too, it seems to me, is both hilarious and deeply wise. It also provides some insight, some resonance into the nature of LOVE MEDICINE, a novel that can work on so many different levels.