Henry Lamartine Junior carried enough shrapnel deep inside of him, still working its way out, to set off the metal detector in the airport. Yet this action reveals that she can be crafty and, in her own understated way, perhaps a bit vengeful. Marie is ready to move on with her marriage and continue to love Nector, since she is a pragmatic and forgiving woman. For the rest of his life, Nector will always wonder whether Marie has read the letter. Nevertheless, she wants him to suffer for what he has done to her, so she puts the letter under a salt can rather than under the sugar jar (where it was originally placed). Nector has left her a note announcing that he is leaving her for Lulu later that night, once Marie hears him coming home, she realizes that he is not going to leave her. Marie's trick on her husband is very revealing of her character. Sometimes he'd look at me, I'd smile, and he'd think to himself: salt or sugar? But he would never be sure. This realization motivates him to get back in touch with Lulu, his former love, before it's too late. He suddenly realizes that he has been carried through rapids for years without appreciating everything around him, and when he looks up "there was less of me." Time, symbolized by water, has already begun to erode him. In this long inner monologue, Nector construes himself as a soft stone being eroded by the waters of time.
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Seventeen years of Nector's life pass quickly, and Erdrich describes this stretch of time by using water imagery. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. It went so fast, is what I'm saying, that I myself sat still in the center of it. What I saw was time passing, each minute collecting behind me before I had squeezed from it any life. Maybe the fast movement of time had made me dizzy. Maybe I took my eyes off the current too quick. Seventeen years of married life and come-and-go children.
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Maybe it was rapids, a swirl that carried me so swift that I could not look to either side but had to keep my eyes trained on what was coming. What they call a lot of water under the bridge. So much time went by in that flash it surprises me yet. Furthermore, on account of their present usage, the beads are a potent reminder of the power of religion in Marie's life. Erdrich's language at the end of the chapter, which aligns the beads with small stones smoothed and broken by waves, is a metaphor for June's past and future hardships. As the reader knows from the first chapter, by the end of her life June has been through countless hardships. Earlier, June arrives at Marie's house already broken down by her mother's death. 95 (2009 edition)Īt the end of the first section of the chapter "The Beads," Erdrich's language makes it clear that Marie's beads are meant to symbolize June. But I see no kindness in how the waves are grinding them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear. At the bottom of the lake, rolled aimless by the waves, I think of them polished. I touch them, and every time I do I think of small stones. I never look at them, just let my fingers roam to them when no one is in the house. I don't pray, but sometimes I do touch the beads. If she "came home" at all, it may have been to heaven. It is clear from how Love Medicine progresses that she never made it home but died out in the fields during the storm. This vivid religious imagery also emphasizes the fact that June's death occurred on or near Easter. However, she walks into a storm, into what the reader visualizes as a dark whiteness, a sight that heralds June's death by hypothermia. Her feet grow cold and then numb, but she is competent in the snow and knows what direction to head towards. When she exits the warm car, it is as though she has experienced a rebirth she walks across the cold, slushy ranchland in thin boots. She decides to walk home to her reservation. The religious and rebirth imagery of June's story concludes, in a sad irony, with her death.
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The snow fell deeper that year than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home. June had wedged herself so tight against the door that when she sprang the latch she fell out.