Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

So that is how Under the Ground knew she had some assistance in her work — things dropped, murmurs, low steps all through the night that she lay with her daughter in the blankets.

By morning, worse. Both woke spotted with the girl’s blood from coughing. Deep in her chest she heard the slow whine of air escaping. Under the Ground built up the fire and cleaned her daughter. Brought out an old robe, ancient and still smelling of the greenwood smoke. Put Anaquot on it and covered her with blankets.

“Mother, Mother,” she said, “N’gah, why have you left me?”

“I’m here,” Under the Ground assured, and set about preparing her things.

“Mother, Mother, are you gone yet? Why don’t you stay with me?”

“I’m here,” wept Under the Ground.

“I’m cold,” said her girl.

Under the Ground built the fire higher and hotter. Down the path came an old man who had been thinking about her, who had pots fall in the night too and wondered who might need him. He took along a young nephew, a helper, yawning and annoyed to be awake.

“Sit over there, sit by the western wall,” insisted the healer, my uncle. “Death is curious and determined. Death comes from that direction. My boy, be strong and do not let anything get by you.”

The door of Under the Ground’s house opened to the east, as all our houses did then. Under the Ground brought the water into it and gave some to the old man but not to the helper. To that boy she said, “Go fetch us some more. Make yourself useful.” She didn’t say it in a rough way, just in a direct way, but still the boy’s heart went resentful. He wanted to run off and set snares in the woods, and he would have done that had he not pitied the girl in the blankets. So small, so bleak, so still, like and unlike his own slim sister. He went out, fetched the water, and in the old way his uncle had taught him, chopping away the ice and sinking the bucket in the stream just a little bit against the flow.

I ignored sticks to carve, rabbit paths perfect for snares, tracks of a deer on the path to the house. I tried to concentrate, even to think the way my uncle might, for the daughter of Under the Ground was laboring to breathe.

The old man drummed.

He picked up and drummed. He used a stick carved of sumac, the beater filled with cattail down. His drum was painted with a long yellow stripe.

Into my mind came the smell of fish and new rice, and then the ash smell of new leaves burning and the touch of my mother’s hands on my face. I could not stay awake. Sometimes I dozed off but my uncle did not — he drummed all day, but the girl continued to go down.

Under the Ground made a paste of leaves, a paste of nettles, a paste of roots she chewed up and spat, a paste of dead bees. She turned her daughter over with gentle care and she bone-doctored, spat out three fat white ants. They crawled into the fire and burst, lighting thick shadows on our faces. Around halfway through the night, my uncle’s voice broke. I took over and sang when Under the Ground bent her head to feel Anaquot’s breath on her cheek, its low, strained rasp.

We went on through the next day in a confused haze, and on through the night. By now there was no time and no meaning. Everything had stopped but my uncle’s drumming. A terrible odor of burning hair, then a strange fugitive sweetness. Food a relative brought, a pot of meat soup, and still the work. Under the Ground’s hair was wild with grease, sweat, and stuck off her shoulders in rigid tails. Her face was harrowed and her eyes sunk and red, tiny with smoke and tears. She’d shrunk and withered on her bones. Her face was bearlike, her snout wide, her eyes deep and dull as nails.

By the third day and night my uncle took me aside, drew me close to him, and whispered, “When you see the old woman go out, open that girl’s eyelids and see if she’s living yet.”

So when Under the Ground went out, drawn by my uncle’s call, I went to her daughter. Her cheek was rock cold and her hand stiff as a bundle of sticks. I thumbed her eyelid up. It stayed up and the iris stared into darkness, chilled and fixed. I pressed down the eyelid and crept back into the corner, put my head down when Under the Ground returned. I poked up the fire and the old woman kept praying, now telling her medicine mean things. Threatening her medicine.

“I’ll throw you away,” she warned. “You’re no good to me if you can’t help my girl.”

She rattled the bag. “Get out of here.” She screamed. “I don’t want you.” She scolded, she grew hard, “I don’t want you unless you help me now.” She threw down her medicine. Dried plants and small objects went rolling across the dirt and hide piled on the packed earth. I was fully awake now, paralyzed with fright. My uncle’s drumming stopped. Even the fire did not dare crackle or shift. In its waiting glow Under the Ground bent to her child and called her in a fearful, soft voice:

“Daughter, daughter…”

Under the Ground stropped her knife on her belt. Singing a wild song I never want to hear again, singing hard and low, then high as a crazy loon, she slashed her arms deeply, four cuts on each arm. The cuts were deep, I saw them. To the bone. The girl moved.

Anaquot sat straight up in the blankets, her hooded eyes still shut. I watched as a smile slowly came across her face, sweet at first, as though she was dreaming, then broader and deeper until it was terrible, a skull’s grin. Her eyes flew open and a staring blackness as of the cold place gripped the room.

That is when I saw Under the Ground throw out one of her daughter’s souls. Throw it out of her. I saw her grab an animal struggling in the girl’s blankets and then she threw it hard at the western wall — through the wall — it was gone — when I looked, and then looked back, the girl had crumpled backward and was peacefully resting.

THAT SOUL stumbled around and got into the body of a white raccoon and for a time it was seen about the edge of the town and on the farms curious and hungry, its eyes full of cunning light. Seemed to us it went around just watching and figuring. Night, the trill it made was a stranger’s laugh. Days, we tried to let it go, tried to forget.

And then an old man trapped the white raccoon, found it in his leg-hold trap, dead. He came to my uncle, shaking. He sat at our table. After a time he spoke, told us he had opened it up and the animal was hollow inside. Nothing there. No heart. No lungs. No guts. Just empty.

Some souls keep stumbling the rough paths. Some try to get into their old beds and rooms. Some you see traveling bad, balls of white light, some you pass in the woods with no notice but the prickle on the back of your neck. Some souls return. Some come back to people. After a time they return with more knowledge than they went out with.

Hers came back with all our secrets. Hers came back with a taste for charred bones. Hers came back with the sensitive paws and bright eyes of a healer. Hers came back masked, laughing, with a mouth full of delicate white teeth. Her soul came back knowing too much, saying no word. Hers came back and that daughter’s name, although nobody dared to use it, was Four Souls from then on.

She was the making of Red Cradle, the making of her son, she was the bad wife of Shaawano, the woman who ran off with a Pillager. She was the mother of Fleur.

EACH OF US has an original, you see, living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life. That life we live in the moving world is the dream life of the copy. She runs, she breathes, she cares for others, she mends their clothes. You gaze into the water of your day and there your face floats back, serene, unguarded. See! See! Beneath that thin smile you are smiling somewhere else. Your hand moves and the hand moves below you. Perhaps in another country more real than you are, in another life.