Love Medicine

In 1957, long after leaving Moses, Lulu is visited by Beverly “Bev” Lamartine, the brother of her dead husband, Henry. Beverly suspects that Lulu’s last child, a little boy named Henry Junior, is his own child. Lulu now has eight sons from Moses, her first legal husband Morrissey, and her latest husband Henry Lamartine, who died in a car accident. Bev’s parents taught him to aspire to higher social status than typically allotted to Indigenous Americans, so he left the reservation to sell textbooks. On the road, he asked for yearly pictures of Henry Junior to give him something to work for. Beverly lives in Minneapolis with his wife, a white woman named Elsa who works as a typist. Despite Elsa’s obvious dislike of children, Beverly is certain that everyone, including Lulu, will be happy with the arrangement he has dreamed up: He wants Henry Junior to come live with him.

Beverly visits Lulu and her boys. He is reminded of his close encounters with Lulu, and she tells him about choosing his brother over him: When they played strip poker, she chose the brother whose reaction satisfied her the most. Beverly notices how much Lulu’s sons love her, and how all Lulu’s boys are “Handsome, rangy, wildly various, [and] bound in total loyalty, not by oath but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism” (118).