Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

Overexertion, overexcitement, a fall, a blow. Any violent emotion, such as anger, sudden and overpowering joy, or fright. Running, dancing, horseback riding over rough roads. Great fatigue, lifting heavy weights, purgative medicines, and, of course, excessive intercourse. Straining at the stool. Hemorrhoids. Bathing in the ocean. Nursing. Tight lacing. Footbaths are dangerous and of course shower bath is too great a shock to the system. One should avoid strenuous coughing or weeping. One should try to suppress the tendency to violent sneezing by washing the ears with tepid salt water.

There was more, much more to keeping a baby from falling out of the body before its term. I noted down every word.

Once again, the next day, I stood at the door and waited for Testor to answer and let me in. She appeared, her broad face pallid and serious. Just as she opened the door, a cry arrested her attention. Her hands flew up around her face. She whirled. I stepped in after her and when she trundled rapidly upstairs, puffing like an engine, I sprang along close behind her. She was too distracted by the cry to really notice me. She fairly charged down the corridor.

It was Fleur, of course. She had just experienced a short epoch of flooding, accompanied by sudden pains. Mauser was gone and Fantan with him, so there I was in a sudden position to take charge. I made the most of it.

“Whiskey, fetch whiskey,” I ordered Testor, “and get the doctor, too.”

In her panic, she obeyed by force of habit as I proceeded to gently coax Fleur to elevate her hips, the child’s cradle, on some pillows. I gave her the remedy my books had recommended for the stoppage of an early derangement of the womb. Perhaps she’d never drunk the stuff before. She took a huge gulp and choked on the fire.

Slowly, slowly, I coached her, just a sip at a time and it will go down smoother.

She was furious and frightened. Her face, against the starched pillowcase that I myself had embroidered, was the color of ashes. Her eyes were black with a desperate and anthracitic heat. She gripped the pillow, as though to squeeze it dead, her hands twisting. Her voice was hoarse as she knocked back the second glass of whiskey.

“Help me!” she cried out.

And straightaway, she caught my heart.

To be needed by someone as strong as Fleur, as bold, as conscious, even though at first glance I had despised her. To be begged in a voice that God heard as well as I. To suddenly realize that if I could lay aside my small contempt, I might cherish her. I might be able to help her grow the child, the babe whom I wanted to live with a longing quite beyond my own selfish habits. By the time the whiskey had taken hold and her body quit attempting to expel the child, she had changed in my mind, but I didn’t yet know how.

“CRUDE, but effective,” said the doctor when he saw the whiskey. “Continue the treatment as required. Don’t let her out of the bed.” He called me near again as he washed his hands.

“I do not treat servants,” he said, flicking water from his hands, “or Indians.”

I suppose that before this moment I might have agreed with him. I might have washed his hands for him with an obsequious little smile, and handed him a clean towel to pat them dry. But at the tone of his voice, some nerve in me was strangely yanked.

“Oh? Oh? I will be certain to make her husband, John James Mauser , aware of your sentiments,” I told the doctor, in an unmistakable rage. My voice rose. “In turn, I am sure that he will make his known to all who serve with him on the hospital board—”

But the man cut me off quite rudely by walking straight from the room without the pretense of a leave-taking. I went back into Fleur’s room right away and helped her to another sip of the spirits, then sat with her, reading aloud from a book of the poems of Lord Byron, until she slept.

SO IT IS I who know as much of the truth of things as one can know. I who was privileged, who was driven to the side of a woman I’d once ordered to wash my clothes. I suppose it could be said that I was humbled, or enlarged. Some truer form of human regard had triumphed in me. The prospect of the child brought me to that. As her pregnancy continued precarious, I visited as often as I could. I worried about my distraction from Placide, but my sister barely noticed my absence and never asked my whereabouts, even when my visits grew so frequent that I spent more time in Fleur’s presence than I did in my own house.

Now, to my surprise, I found it easy to be with Fleur. The room she had shared with Mauser, but now slept in alone, was very calm with its wallpaper of an eggshell brocade. The bed coverlet was made of old lace, folded down around her feet, and from that bed she watched the fire wink on the ebony mantelpiece in which were emblazoned cockleshells, the carved faces of sea nymphs, and dancing goddesses. I found it brought me peace to sit with Fleur hour upon hour. She spoke little at first and never smiled, though I think she enjoyed the music of verse. Most often, she passed her hours in a blank weariness that had in it no hint of either hostility or resentment. When my voice grew hoarse from reading aloud, I crocheted blankets for the baby or sewed pieces of a tiny layette. When my eyes failed or my fingers cramped, I simply sat and watched the afternoon light pass across the walls.

The shadows of the ash leaves as the sun moved behind them were very graceful, their movements hypnotic and sad. The radiance of late afternoon struck the fireplace and picked out the figures of the captive Graces. In that quiet, I reflected often on the house in which I’d passed my days. I had seen it raised from the beginning. I knew its natural provenance, as well as its present existence. I had watched John James Mauser build it for my sister, after all, and had been moved and impressed by the making of it.

At the time, though I had sympathized in and even acted in protest at the treatment of the horses that dragged its great blocks of stone uphill, it had not occurred to me that humans were ill treated in the matter too. All of the materials, the fabric, all the raw stuff of our opulent shelter were taken from Fleur’s people. She described her natal lands and informed me of their rapine treatment at the hands of white men, at the hands of Mauser himself. As I sat in the room with the woman talking or dreaming in the bed, many thoughts came. It occurred to me to imagine her as a person — as a woman with family and feelings for them such as my own. I began to wonder who they were, and where she was from in actual truth and not the land of my misperceptions. And then, one day when she was half caught in sleep or in the whiskey the doctor prescribed and I spooned out by the hour, Fleur spoke. In a raving melancholy, she poured out language by the tub, all the time gazing straight into my eyes. Of course, I couldn’t understand a single word of her vagabond tongue, but I did know she was asking for my help. That was unmistakable. She began to weep. I put my hand on her forehead and stroked her brow until she grew calmer. Piece by piece, over the weeks and months, there then grew from such moments between us a connection. And from that connection, I am not ashamed to say it, there grew love.

THE CHILD was born screaming and would not be soothed until I thought to dip my finger into the whiskey cup and lay it on his kitten’s tongue. Afterward, we painted Fleur’s nipples with it so that the child would suck, although, by then, as she continued her medicinal drinking, I suppose he imbibed plenty at the breast. For the first week, I slept in the cellar, in Fleur’s old bed, and raced up the stairs when hearing the faintest cries. The next week, I slept on a pallet on the floor of the nursery. Soon I had the closet. Then my old room back. Nursemaid, doctor, fictional aunt, slave to the tiny one, servant to the mother too, I was in my correct element. I did all I could for Fleur, supplied the antidote for any worry, the remedy for any need, subdued any craving. I was so thoroughly immersed in my role, and in the charming new life, that only later, a good three months along, did I begin to have an inkling of what was starting to happen.