Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

IN THE TIME before the time the last treaty came about, there was a great healing that took place in the camp of Under the Ground. It made us weep, it made us sorry, it made us wonder who we are. It made confusion between the dead and the living, this world and the other alongside our ordinary life. And yet, in spite of those conflicts, what happened that night gave slender hope on the reservation land that the old ones called ishkonigan, leftover, scraps so poor even the greediest would cast these bits aside.

The mother of the girl who became the one we know as Four Souls was born upon the great red island, fourth daughter of a fourth daughter in a line of dawn woman healers going back across the miigis water and farther yet, back before the oldest remember. Everybody who met her face-to-face thought her a simple woman — small, short, and round with a capturing smile. Her eyes, they might be penetrating when they wanted to know your case, but otherwise they had no other symptom in them but kindness. Nevertheless, she had accomplished something few understood.

As it happened, disease struck. Some left old sacred ground, struck out for the new, hearing some fresh powerful tale of the men in black robes who did not copulate. Besides cures, people needed supplies. Blankets. Knives. Who can blame them? Supposing the world went dead around you and all the animals were used up. The sky, too, of pigeons, doves, herons, and rain. Supposing one new sickness after another came and racked deep, so that young men and women threw themselves on stones to break their limbs in the crush of their fever. Suppose this happened in your own life, what then, would you not think of surrendering to the cross, of leading yourself into the hands of new medicines?

Some did, many did, for a time I was even one. But I came back from the Jesuits with a pair of eyeglasses, six books, a watch, and the old gods still strong in my heart. I am Nanapush. I am the one they call fire, the one who makes my own snare, who shot off a tree branch, ate snakes to survive, had wife upon wife, and remembers the making of Under the Ground.

She took her name when she was still a young girl registered as Fanny. At the loss of her own mother from the welted sickness, she decided, in anger, to go after death itself, and so had herself buried alive in a birch-bark covering. Connected only to the upper world by a breathing straw, she went down into the earth. Four days. Four nights. She decided to search through the layers of the earth. She would search for special help as she descended deeper, deeper. The old men drummed and the women sang to give her courage, but all that they could see from the soft earth of her grave was the tube of rawhide. Passing their hands above the opening not a one of them could tell whether or not she still drew breath.

It was on the fifth dawn they uncovered her, gently, scooping out dirt with their old paws. Singing, they brushed the earth away from her face, blue black and stone hard. They continued. Took the rawhide straw from her lips still frozen in a frowning o . Finally lifted her out in her stiff death shape and shook the dirt and beetles and worms from her clothes and hair. She was wearing a red dress and smelled of the beginnings of a powerful decay, a smell of bear, a smell of the dead lashed high in trees, an odor that came and went the rest of her life when she knew she would lose out to her enemy, death.

Niiban , crooned the old ones, mino ayaa sana , laying her upon a laced platform of blankets. Sleep and be well, though whether she was dead or living they did not know, not yet, not until during the quiet, slow, washing of her face and arms her eyelids throbbed, her mouth unpinched, and she drew a rough breath.

SO THAT was how she got her power and her name changed from Fanny Migwans into Anamaiiakiikwe, Under the Ground. That was how she got her chance to doctor. She was told the names of plants down there. She cured me once, I remember, of an eyesore sickness that came from rubbing my face after cleaning some fish. She mixed up a pulp of roots by chewing. Spitting, she made a paste of that and tenderly soothed it onto my shut eyelids. I remember her square woman’s hands — padded, priestly, warm — her slow calm, her bear’s eyes, her grip.

She had no children until she was well into the fourth decade of her life, and then she had a daughter by an Odawa man she loved and who loved her and who came to her house to visit every night. The daughter, you could tell, was the blood of her heart. Warm-eyed, laughing. Under the Ground named her Anaquot, Cloud, raised her close, and took her everywhere, first in a pack trimmed in black velvet that she decorated with beaded flowers and red straps, then alongside her on a small pony, walking slow, then everywhere as though she was her helper in the doctoring. They picked plants, offering tobacco to each one, and they tended their traplines and fished together on the lake. All winter, every day, Under the Ground broke a trail for Anaquot to walk to school. Every night, she brought her daughter home safe through the woods and put her in her own blankets, rolled her tight. They had a garden of squash and beans, and some wild brown chickens, a dog, a stand of chokecherries, and a slough where occasionally Under the Ground took her shotgun and blasted down a duck for her daughter’s supper.

This was how they lived until the girl’s eleventh full year, when she sickened suddenly, of a disease that had no name and had never been seen before on this reservation ground so that no one knew what to do.

It started as a weakness in the eyes and a tired sorrow, then a low cough that did not get better but deepened until the lungs made pink foam, but then, in the case of Anaquot, six nights of drumming and suck doctoring frightened away the disease so she seemed better all that winter, even cured.

During that time, another child, LaFortier’s son, fell in hot coals of the sugaring fire and caught his little shirt in flames, ran in circles until his uncle put it out. This child was laid more dead than living on a blanket at the sugaring camp, and Under the Ground was fetched. She came quickly, and used a paste on the boy’s burnt skin. She then caused the fire to be built up exactly as it was when the child fell in. She talked to that fire and prayed with it. Then she gathered its coals and tamed them in her hands, spoke to them softly, until they did not cause pain to her or to the child they had burned.

The boy healed with only the faintest ripple of scars, but from that time on, Under the Ground’s hands were striped by wrinkled gray tissue, bent like a frog’s. Yet she never hid her hands away in her apron. She was proud.

During the next winter, though, Anaquot stumbled on the path from school and fell asleep in snow. Her mother found her when the light was almost blue, and carried her home slung across her back, still dreaming in sleep that grew deeper and yet more restless as the night went on. By morning, Under the Ground’s eyes burnt and her own limbs loosened and she slept curled around her daughter in terror.

You heal by taking on the pain of others, by going down to argue with death itself, by swallowing the sharp bone and vomiting the sickness out in your own blood. That old woman’s daughter lay next to her, close, curled the way she used to lie within her mother’s body. The healer ached for her child’s return. There was nothing — no act, no murder, no betrayal, no agony — that she was not prepared to accomplish in order to save her girl.

Under the Ground woke to hear unusual noises.

The shadow of a person wanders as though sorry to leave. Touching old possessions — a kettle, a favorite knife. Sometimes a shadow takes a water pail, a dipper, a handful of flour or rice, but it cannot use these things, must drop them, demands attention in that way.