Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

Once she carried the child, Fleur was caught and she knew it, for although she was enduring, strong, bold, and remarkable, she had a weakness. She had survived the sicknesses that destroyed the rest of the Pillagers, but she was affected by the ravage of those fevers. I only know what I’ve heard from listening in on the women, from things Margaret has revealed to me of women’s private business. But from eavesdropping on them I understand that bearing children was dangerous for Fleur. In order not to let the child out too soon, Fleur had to stay still, keep to her bed. And that was where the whiskey got hold of her. As it has with so many of us, even myself, the liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts.

IN THE YEARS after Fleur left, I had fallen into a state of keen and busy sorrow. I diverted myself with politics, stood for the tribal chairman, and immersed myself in a snow of white paper. I had argued about existence and the intentions of the whiteman’s God on earth with the Jesuits and then with Father Damien, but I had never come to grips with the worst scourge ever loaded on us. Smallpox ravaged us quick, tuberculosis killed us slow, liquor made us stupid, religion meddled with our souls, but the bureaucrats did the worst and finally bored us to death. I soon found that the stacks of rules and regulations that I had to understand in order to run the tribe pinched my brain and made me even touchier than Margaret.

Along with rules, there came another affliction. Acquisition, the priest called it. Greed. There was no word in our language to describe this urge to own things we didn’t need. Where before we always had a reason for each object we kept, now the sole reason was wanting it. People traded away their land for pianos they couldn’t play and bought clothing too fancy for their own everyday use. They bought spoons made of silver when there wasn’t food, and gilded picture frames when they had neither pictures nor walls. A strange frenzy for zhaaginaash stuff came over the best of us. Where before we gave our things away and were admired for our generosity, now we grew stingy and admired ourselves for what we grabbed and held. Even Margaret, whose eyes were sharp for foolishness, was overcome.

It was the nuns who changed Margaret, those women with the poor mouth souls. Ever since Margaret had visited the nuns’ residence, she had wanted a floor covering like theirs. The substance they walked on was both soft and hard, she told me, and could be mopped shiny clean. It was far more beautiful than stone, earth, or wood; it was more green than leaves, with drops of cream and ink curled through it. “As though a child were playing in paint with a matchstick,” she said. I nodded. I knew all about paint, for Margaret had bought paint one day and done something very beautiful and strange.

We had cleared a path to the cabin and then widened it enough to accommodate a wagon. I thought it was fine as it was, but Margaret wanted to improve this path. Somewhere, she got an idea to use the asiniig, our grandfathers, stones I had gathered in a heap near my sweat lodge just out back of the cabin. One by one, she lugged them out and placed them on either side of the road, leaving a tiny pinch of tobacco next to each one as an apology — or a request, for she had further plans. Early the next day she left for town and came back with the paint. Pink paint. With careful strokes of a brush that she made herself, from a squirrel’s tail, she painted every one of those rocks leading up to our place. Pink was the color. A bright candy pink.

“Onizhishin,” I said. For sure, they looked marvelous, so bright in the green scruff and dead leaves. “You’ve dressed up our ancestors.”

“It was nothing.” Margaret was modest, but I suppose my admiration for her work had some effect, for she began to improve the rest of our dwelling.

“If we have to stay in one place,” she reasoned, “if we can’t move around anymore and follow the rice and maple sugar and meat, then I plan to live in a good way. First, we have to make a better outhouse, just like Father Damien has drawn for us, and then… well, I’ve got an idea.”

No more sitting in the sun, dreaming and smoking my pipe. Now, if I wanted Margaret to cook for me or even to give me a kind word now and then, I was forced to work. I dug a hole for trash, burned it, and scattered the ashes. I chopped and even stacked fire-wood. I swept clean the ground leading up to our door. Inside our cabin, we had already packed the earth down hard and laid skins over it. I took out the skins each morning and shook them clean. Instead of walking right inside we took our makizinan off at our door. We sat on the skins and blankets, or the spindly wooden chair Margaret had traded for an old buffalo hide. She had me tack up a shelf on one side of the room. There was enough pink paint to brighten the boards. The centerpiece of our cabin was a stove with a pipe running into the wall. The stove was black iron, fancy, with a small nickel grill and a cooking box. We even nailed together a small table. It now looked to me like we had a comfortable and even fancy place, and I said so, but Margaret couldn’t get the nuns’ floor out of her mind. She kept pining over it, stabbing her finger at the skins on our dirt floor and frowning. She kept thinking of ways to get that substance — linoleum.

I hoped that, as with many of her enthusiasms, she’d get over it. She’d once had a frenzy for making maple sugar candy in carved wooden molds. She’d gotten past that. And then there was the time she planted a garden, not with the old varieties of squash and corn, but new and outlandish seeds that produced round globes of bitter melons that blackened at the first frost, hard yellow roots to cook and mash, and tart, ripe, red love apples that stung the mouth. I thought linoleum would fade just as these other fancies had, but then I noticed that Margaret had grown distant. Her gaze had a faraway quality, as if she were peering into the future. She figured and she plotted. She found a salesman and purchased small linoleum pieces that she laid on the ground and looked at for hours, as though she could grow them across the floor by the intensity of her stare. But the bits glowed against the earth or clean skins and did nothing.

“They are dead. They never had any life,” I told her. “Forget them and nestle in my arms.”

Margaret waved a hand to shut me up and took out her little pipe and tobacco pouch. She loaded it, puffed away as if her brain were on fire and her thoughts were the smoke, rising in thick circles. Her eyes narrowed and she glared in a fixed black way at nothing. From time to time she gestured and nodded and smiled to some invisible person. I should have worried about her right then, but instead I grew annoyed.

“The earth is much better than the linoleum you crave, and so are the skins beneath our feet. Leave off thinking of the nuns’ floor or you will sicken yourself, and me!”

But she did not, the smooth stuff gripped her. It drove her to distraction and the urge to finally acquire it ended up fracturing her will.

WE WERE snared in laws by then. Pitfalls and loopholes. Attempting to keep what was left of our land was like walking through a landscape of webs. With a flare of ink down in the capital city, rights were taken and given. Finding an answer from a local official was more difficult than tracking a single buffalo through the mazed tracks of creatures around a drinking hole. We acquired an Allotment Agent to make it easier for us to sell our land to white people. Then we got a Farmer in Charge to help us chop our trees down, our shelter, and cut the earth up, our mother. Land dwindled until there wasn’t enough to call a hunting territory. That was because we were supposed to learn to farm in the chimookomaan way, using toothed machines and clumsy, big horses to pull them. We were all going to have to plant seeds the way Margaret did, for the rest of our lives, and yet we’d only just grown used to the idea that we owned land — something that could not possibly belong to any human.