Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

things to say.
    For instance, besides the fact of Lulu Lamartine’s first husband, why did each of the boys currently shooting milk jugs out front of Henry’s house look so different? There were eight of them. Some of them even had her maiden name. The three oldest were Nanapushes. The next oldest were Morrisseys who took the name Lamartine, and then there were more assorted younger Lamartines who didn’t look like one another, either.
    Red _—ago hair and blond abounded; there was some brown. The black hair on the seven-year-old at least matched his mother’s. This boy was named Henry junior, and he had been born approximately nine months after Henry Senior’s death.
    Give or take a week, Beverly thought, looking from Henry Junior out the window back to the woman across the table. Beverly was quite certain that he, and not his brother, was the father of that boy. In fact, Beverly had come back to the reservation with a hidden purpose.
    Beverly Lamartine wanted to claim Henry junior and take him home.
    In the Twin Cities there were great relocation opportunities for Indians with a certain amount of natural stick-to-itiveness and pride.
    That’s how Beverly saw it. He was darker than most, but his parents had always called themselves French or Black Irish and considered those who thought of themselves as Indians quite backward. They had put the need to get ahead in Beverly. He worked devilishly hard.
    Door to door, he’d sold children’s after-school home workbooks for the past eighteen years. The wonder of it was that he had sold any workbook sets at all, for he was not an educated man and if the customers had, as they might naturally do, considered him an example of his product’s efficiency they might not have entrusted their own children to those pages of sums and reading exercises. But they did buy the workbook sets regularly, for Bev’s ploy was to use his humble appearance and faulty grammar to ease into conversation with his hardworking get-ahead customers. They looked forward to seeing the higher qualities, which they could not afford, inculcated in their own children. Beverly’s territory was a small-town world of earnest dreamers. Part of Bev’s pitch, and the one that usually sold the books, was to show the wife or husband a wallet-sized school photo of his son.
    That was Henry junior. The back of the photo was A “To Uncle Bev,” but the customer never saw that, because the precious relic was encased in a cardboard-backed sheet of clear plastic. This covering preserved it from thousands of mill-toughened thumbs in the working-class sections of Minneapolis and small towns within its one-hundred-mile radius. Every year or so Beverly wrote to Lulu, requesting another picture. It was sent to him in perfect goodwill.
    With every picture Beverly grew more familiar with his son and more inspired in the invention of tales he embroidered, day after day, on front porches that were to him the innocent stages for his routine.
    His son played baseball in a sparkling-white uniform stained across the knees with grass. He pitched no-hitters every few weeks. Teachers loved the boy for getting so far ahead of the other students on his own initiative. They sent him on to various higher grades, and he was invited to the parties of children in the wealthy suburb of Edina.
    Henry junior cleared the hurdles of class and intellect with an case astonishing to Beverly, who noted to his wistful customers how swiftly the young surpass the older generation.
    “Give them wings!” he would urge, flipping softly through the cheap pulp-flecked pages. The sound of the ruffled paper was like the panic of fledglings before they learn how to glide. People usually bought, and only later, when they found themselves rolling up a work-skills book to slaughter a fly or scribbling phone numbers down on the back of Math Enrichment, would they realize that their children had absolutely no interest in taking the world by storm through