Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

Fleur’s dullness and depletion, her sunk eye, yellowed skin, had begun to give me concern. I was slightly reassured when she rallied. She took charge of herself, rose from bed, began to walk and take air. But although I could see how her strength quickly improved, I also noticed that she had acquired a taste for the stuff that had arrested her labor. She would not be without a decanter of whiskey in any room, and she sipped it throughout the day. Though I never saw her visibly intoxicated, though she never slurred her talk or stumbled, it was clear that she had began to rely on the liquor and was lost without its golden fire.

THESE WERE the happiest and the most requited times of my existence. The baby soft as butter, the blue-eyed little prince, was astonishingly like his father in coloration, and he was placid, either sweet or indifferent of temper. He started out thin and puling, but soon grew rolls and puckers, anklets and bracelets of silken fat. My continual presence at the house was accepted as long as I did not outstay my welcome, into the evening, but retired by the time John James Mauser returned for dinner. Still, I think that Mauser was amused at my enthusiasm for the boy, and perhaps sympathetic to my fervor, as it resembled his own. I found that I could sit in one place and simply stare at the baby without suffering one second of boredom or impatience. I’d never had the experience of this awed foolishness, this trance. I seemed quite brainless. I heard myself give out coos, hoots, burbles— noises I had never before uttered, animallike and almost desperate. Sometimes I gazed so long into the baby’s face that I forgot my own face. Or I touched the shining hands and forgot my own borders, melted skin through skin. As I made my way home each night, I had to remind myself that he was birthed of Fleur, belonged to Mauser, that I was nothing and no relation. Yet I had given away my own heart, and once that’s done there is no easy way to take it back.

T HE COUGHBALL of an owl is a packed lump of everything the bird can’t digest — bones, fur, teeth, claws, and nails. An owl tears apart its catch, gulps it down whole, and nourishes itself on blood and flesh. The residue, the undissolvable, fuses. In the small, light, solid pellet, the frail skull of a finch, femur of a mouse, cleft necklace of vertebrae, seed-fine teeth, gray gopher and rabbit fur. A perfect compression of being. What is the essence, the soul? my Jesuit teachers used to ask of their students. What is the irreducible? I answer, what the owl pukes. That is also the story — what is left after the events in all their juices and chaos are reduced to the essence. The story— all that time does not digest.

Fleur left the reservation. Of all that happened day to day, all the ins and outs of her existence, we have what came of the accumulation. We have the story.

The coughball itself is also a valuable find. Bad omen, but good medicine. It cures headaches, too much monthly blood, fevers, flux, sore feet, love. Fleur never used it, she never needed any medicine to snag her men. They fell her way like notched trees. She treated them that way, too, and burned them with her heat or used them for her purpose. Which is how, the second time Fleur Pillager went off the reservation, she toppled Minneapolis society and made a son. But her power got to be too much for her. She got careless. Too bold. She should have known that it is wrong to bear a child for any reason but to surrender your body to life.

Fleur was what you might call stingy with her spirit gifts, and so she didn’t get much back from other humans. Revenge, she wanted that. And also restoration. Don’t forget. She wanted her land back and if she couldn’t have the trees she wanted some equivalent justice for their loss. She was so concentrated on her plan that she could not receive. Not much love, is what I’m saying. She wasn’t loved. Eyah! Of course there was Eli, but there I rest my case. Yes, she was passioned . Men made brainless fools out of themselves in pursuit. They adored her and feared her in equal measure, as Eli did, and as Mauser did now.

We are all imperfect in our love for one another. That is why we turn to that kind spirit who created us. Gizhe Manito tries to protect us but sometimes fails, like any parent. Yet this spirit does not stop loving us. That is the one to whom Fleur turned, I am sure of it, to argue against like a parent when everything was taken. Everything, of course, except her young daughter, Lulu.

No, she did not give her first child away. It was not as they insist. Fleur merely took the girl off to hide her the way a wolf hides a pup when she must do battle to protect her standing or confront a danger. That’s how it was. Lulu was to be hidden in the government school, safe. Not left, not forgotten. This is what she did.

SHE HAD COME to kill and humiliate and take back her land, which he had stolen so carelessly that he wasn’t aware of it, but then Mauser made himself her dog anyway and wanted her in such an absence of self that she put aside her knife. Whatever tenderness Fleur owned at the time was attached to her child. What love she felt was buried underneath a tree marked by a red flag. Her love was bones, or bound up in loss. No man had truly felt it. So when Mauser bared his heart and throat he knew, perhaps, the wolf in her couldn’t kill him on instinct and the woman in her could not destroy him out of sheer intrigue.

He would have broken into a drenching, clear sweat, but ever since Fleur had returned his body to him, he had exercised increasing control over all of its jerks and spasms and eccentric twitches. She had healed him in order to wreck him in good condition, which to her was the only honorable way a Pillager could take satisfaction in vengeance. But healing a man is dangerous. I was going to say a man like Mauser . But perhaps it is dangerous for a woman to heal any man at all.

He desired her and she grew accustomed to her power. Maybe she desired him, though she would never admit it to me. Some women like a smart man, and others prefer a fool. Speaking as both, I can tell you it doesn’t matter if you can convince a woman you have something to hide.

So perhaps that was how John James Mauser did it. He threw out a net of questions, uncertainties, riddles, and Fleur dove into it, curious as an otter. She was snagged. She would be dragged along the bottom. She would be weakened and changed. His desire would exhaust her, and the high life temporarily fascinate her with its rich swirl of hilarious chimookomaanag doings and foods. She would be dazzled more than anything by the mounds of smoked white sturgeon at the party given in her honor at their wedding. For many years afterward, she talked of it. Platters of that most exquisite fish, dishes large as wagon wheels, piled high.

Uncle , she’d say, I wish I could eat it all again!

She withheld herself physically from Mauser until he came up with the papers and then went through with the wedding. By zhaaginaash law, she understood that his legal wife would inherit all he owned. Once she figured out how to kill him, she’d have her land back. But she could not kill him with a knife, this time— she would have to use much more subtle means, undetectable means, if that were possible. The problem was, the closer she got to the man she’d come to destroy, the muddier grew her intentions. She kept putting off his death. He took her traveling, brought her to theaters and great halls where she heard a new and violently beautiful music. They went to places where a thousand pictures were stored on the walls. He fed her the flesh of animals she’d never tasted. The meat of fruits she’d never seen. He seemed to get a hold over her in bed, too — perhaps some chimookomaan form of manaa that wrecked her resolve, at least for a short time after their marriage. That was probably when she was not careful enough with her counting of the days between moons. Anishinaabeg women had known, well before the Catholics preached it, a method of strict accounting by moon to regulate the even and timely appearance of their children. She never said it, but I believe that Mauser overwhelmed Fleur’s feminine defenses, perhaps with liquor. I don’t know when she first touched it, but it stands to reason that the taste of whiskey could have messed up her system of counting. For I don’t believe Fleur ever meant to have a child with Mauser.