The Antidote by Karen Russel

Highlights from "The Antidote" by Karen Russell

A trance is like a waking sleep, girl. Where did you go in your mind, when your body was in terrible pain? When the pain felt shattering? Remember what you did to survive it. Do it again.

I had no idea how to repair the harm of Thelma’s insult. It ran deeper than words. But health surrounds a wound—that I knew from Coach. Healing is what a living body directs itself to do.

I became ever more skillful at passing my fakes into people. And it’s a good thing, too, because in the weeks following Black Sunday, a panic seized the town. There was a run on the Antidote. Not because people thought she was a failing bank, but because they were fleeing the collapsing town of Uz.

I moved through the crowded hall, nodding to the faces that noticed me. People who work the land for hours and hours a day begin to look like brothers and sisters. Hammered flat by the same sun. Our foreheads are furrowed from squinting, our noses scaly and peeling. We churned slowly around the large bare floor, commiserating about the universal luck that is weather.

There are factions, of course: God Has Abandoned Us vs. We Have Abandoned Him.

bate at the Grange. It is difficult to order the betrayals in our region, they are so numerous. The hand of Providence feels like a child’s fist to me, shaking and flinging toys across a tabletop. A thousand bone-white tractors are scattered like shining jacks across the Plains. The frame houses are turning back into tinder, the old soddies smashed flat as mud pies.

All the banks within a hundred miles of Uz have closed. The Bank of Alliance, the Bank of the Prairie. Gone. Collapsed. Kaput.

He was staring up at me with his sparse shock of black hair and a child’s hungry eyes, as if he wanted to spoon my luck out of me and spread it golden on toast.

My daddy used to cut an apple and use it for a clock. Set it on the counter and watch it go brown and sour. I guess that’s what’s happening in this country. It’s getting browner and browner… darker and nastier…

There was a loose and unmoored energy sweating out of everyone around me, skulking and swaying and coughing into our fists, considering the stranger with her boxy black camera. I heard what nobody was saying: why did Uncle Sam send a Black woman to make our portraits? I felt like a sailor watching a storm building at sea. Our surprise could go in any direction now.

I have been vigilant, I have tried not to get caught up in the wind that turns the weather vane.

Roy told me that we were making history. We were “introducing America to Americans.” We were also making advertisements for Roosevelt’s New Deal programs — including our own. We knew the faces that carried the most weight with Congress. The need that triggered avalanches of compassion was White need. The aid programs received support in proportion to voters’ perception of the desperation among the rural poor.

At the Milford Home, this was the lesson branded onto our hearts, one we came to understand better than any Bible verse. If there was breath in your lungs you had not yet hit bottom.

We wandered down the main drag of the new town, ravenous and giddy after hours on the bus. Stray dogs were following us, because Pazi and Ellda kept stopping to rub their bellies. “Quit that!” I hissed. “We look like rubes!” But Valeria, who talks to animals as if they are visiting dignitaries from a superior planet, seemed embarrassed by my reaction. “Please don’t mind my friend,” she said, bending to scratch their scabby ears. “She is still shaken up from the ride.”

I could feel my teammates around me, watching these embraces, the frustrated tears that were absorbed by mothers’ cheeks, the whispers of encouragement from the large families who adored these tall, stinking, sweaty, bleeding, defeated Princesses. Who were still undefeated, I let myself know for just a heartbeat. Who were in fact the winners of this life, surrounded by such love.

Ania and I saw clearly then that the Indians who lived beside us had been made into prisoners on their homeland. What had happened to the Poles in Germany was happening here, and no settler lifted a hand to stop it.

Well, how could I help anyone, when I did not have anything? I first needed power myself, I reasoned. Once I had my own land and money, then I would be able to help others.

That taught me more than the words did. Every joke brought another lesson. Every sad or tragic story. If a homesteader was murdered, Indians were always the first suspected of the crime. If two hundred Indian women and children and elders were ambushed on a spring morning and massacred by soldiers of the United States Army, the newspapers called it “a battle.”

The more we learned, the less I wished to understand who we were in this story.

I am a Catholic who moved to Nebraska to live out Christ’s teachings. Love your neighbor as yourself. Give him the shirt off your back. We took everything from the Indians. Even their children.

Do you think that Dew killed her?” “No.” Shadows waved on the red wall around us. “Who, then?” “Some old boyfriend. Someone she met on a barstool. It doesn’t matter who did it. She’s gone.” “Is that how you really feel?” The girl looked at me with black holes for eyes.

I would not offer this young liar absolution, or anything else. How was it my job to treat her welling shame? Do that work yourself, I thought. Don’t ask me to do it for you. Find your way through the difficult feelings, then start to put things right.

Look at the rosewood mandolin in the corner of this bedroom. People string catgut over a hole, and send music pouring into the atmosphere. Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place. There is a spot in the Sandhills where a spring fed by the aquifer lifts from deep underground, bubbling into earshot. I want to serve a song like that one.

Remembering someone you’ve lost can feel like drinking mist. I was thirsty for more.

If you do not have the power to say no, your yes is meaningless.

“Now, I don’t know exactly what it’s all going to look like but, well, the Pawnee reservation in Oklahoma is a six-hour drive south of Uz—” “Everything the Founders did was perfectly legal,” Mr. Unger cut in. “It’s a shame, what happened to the Indians, but it’s over and done with.” “If we give everything back, we’ll have nothing!” “All right, Willa. That’s a fair point. What about, ‘something’? There’s a lotta room,” I said, “between ‘everything’ and ‘nothing.’ I wanted to open up the conversation…”

What my father’s deposit taught me is that there are many alternatives that we have never explored…” The paper was shaking in my hands. My train of thought kept jumping the tracks. “There’s got to be another way…”

I guess, the way I see it, you could tell the story of the Dust Bowl another way. You could widen the lens and say: this land is blowing because we stole it from the people who know how to care for it. Before we uprooted the prairie, we uprooted human beings. With our cooperation, the United States waged a war against the Indians, who were farming these lands long before our arrival, and—I think we can all admit—with much better results. Our war created the conditions for the dust clouds that swallow the sun. Now we’re the ones forced to leave our homes—tractored off, dusted out, foreclosed on. It was a great collapse of memory that paved the way for our collapse.

If the Pawnees had been permitted to stay on their lands—if the Ponca and the Omaha and the Otoe and the Missouria and the Lakota and the Dakota and the Cheyenne and the Arapaho and the dozens of other tribes had not been forced from their homes, “removed” to reservations—then maybe the Dust Bowl would never have happened. What color would the sky be today, if our government had respected treaty rights, instead of handing our parents this “free Indian land”? Drought would come—no doubt—but grass would anchor the sod.

Now that we settlers are being moved off this land and resettled ourselves, we can see clearly what this system of ours produces: end-of-the-world weather and desecrated earth.

What I wanted to say was that I’d soared as the crow flies inside my father’s memory, and I’d seen more than he was able to see: the plow that broke these plains was the plow that broke my family back in German-occupied Poland: the plow of empire. The plow that displaces and murders people, tearing them from their homes. The plow that levels more than tallgrass. The plow pushed by people like me. Like my papa, I grew up believing that there was no other way for us to survive on this arid land. Could I imagine another way? Until my strange luck began, I had never even tried.

Anything that is yours alone can become a curse, even good fortune. This understanding hit me with the force of revelation. Words alone won’t do it justice.

I don’t want to live this way any longer, swinging in a sightless panic to defend the box into which I was born, repeating the story that it’s necessary.