Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

Just as the first of us had failed at growing or herding or plowing the fields, we were told we could sign a piece of paper and get money for the land, but that no one would take the land until we paid the money back. Mortgage, this was called. This piece of banker’s cleverness sounded good to many. I spoke against this trick, but who listened to old Nanapush? People signed the paper, got money. Some farmed. Others came home night after night for months full of whiskey and food. Suddenly the foreclosure notice was handed out and the land was barred. It belonged to someone else. Now it appeared that our people would turn into a wandering bunch, begging at the back doors of white houses and town buildings. Then laws were passed to outlaw begging and even that was solved. No laws were passed to forbid starvation, though, and so the Anishinaabeg were free to do just that.

Yes, we were becoming a solved problem. That’s what I’m saying. Who worries about the dead? They are safe in the ground.

NECTOR OWNED land that was allotted to him as a child, though he wasn’t old enough to take care of it yet. Nector’s land was half slough, but that’s not bad, that’s where the ducks land. Part field if you wanted field, or clearing, and part dense birch woods with burnt-over patches where raspberries and blueberries and tart high-bush cranberries sprouted. This land was waiting for Nector, but then one day as I was making my way back to our cabin from town, where I had traded for a jar of maple syrup, I saw that a motorized wagon as well as an ox-drawn wagon and three chimookomaanag were making a road on Nector’s land. I stopped. They were chopping birch down and loading them. Clearing another field just past that.

I walked up to one of them, a brown-haired chimookomaan who gave the orders, and I said to him, “What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like, old savage? Get the hell outta here or I’ll fix your ugly face.”

He turned away and his young muscled back covered with a moss brown shirt was like a mute wall. How this one set of humans came to be so often afflicted with a common blindness strains my powers. It’s a sad thing. I quietly turned away and as I meekly disappeared around the side of their truck I added, to the gas in their tank, the maple syrup that I was bringing home for Margaret. I hated to waste good syrup, but the young pup had given me no choice.

I went home intending to speak immediately to Margaret about the matter. Her round ojiid greeted me, for she was crouched on her hands and knees when I came in. She was laying a stick marked with red lines around the bottom logs of the cabin, muttering to herself. After a while I figured out that she was measuring the floor.

“What are you doing?” I said for the second time that afternoon. And just like the thick, muscled young man clearing Nector’s land, she turned her back on me. She wouldn’t talk to me. After a time I understood it wasn’t that she was angry, just that she was absorbed in some female dealing of her own. I watched her place the stick just so and mutter to herself until I got bored, and then I gave up and left her. Later, I regretted it, for I had to find out what Margaret had done from Bernadette Morrissey.

“SOLD IT,” said Bernadette with the agent’s desk between us. “Or at least part. The eighty acres that adjoins hers, she kept.”

I had to make Bernadette repeat what she’d told me in Ojibwemowin in order to make certain I had the sense of it. And then, once I was satisfied that the horse-face spoke the truth, once I had looked upon the papers for myself, I was afflicted by a sorrowful anger. My sweetheart, my porcupine woman, my prickly dove, had exchanged the real ground for the false ground. My Margaret had betrayed us. She had bought her linoleum and given away Nector’s earth.

NOW MARGARET had stood up with the Pillagers, and she had fought for the land. She had ignored the threats of Agent Tatro. She had fought against Agent Tatro, against the Lazarres and Morrisseys, and she had enjoyed every battle. Through the worst of things, she came out urging defiance. When her head was shaved, she’d got more vigorous instead of hiding away in shame. Her rage increased in the cold wind around her ears. The coalhod bonnet I bought for her inspired her fierce tirades and gave her confidence to rail against the agent with gall and fire. True, she had diverted the money meant to pay off the Pillager fees and applied it on Kashpaw land — but it was done in defense at least of keeping some share of the earth. Margaret was always for the land, if nothing else. Nothing stopped her in this quest, until that linoleum. Because of it, she betrayed herself, and worse, she betrayed her son.

SO WHEN I came home days after I’d found out about the sale, and when I saw that she had fit this new covering onto the floor, I did not speak. I didn’t trust myself. So much given for so little. A false and foolish thing. Margaret’s eye challenged me to take issue and have my say. But I did not. She knew that I knew the truth, but I said nothing, which mystified her at first. I merely shook out the newspaper that I’d picked up in town and sat down on my little bench beside the door. All that afternoon, I sat there refusing to work, an old man in the sun, while Margaret put the finishing touches on her floor. After it was glued to boards placed on the earth, smoothed, and waxed, she spent a very long time enraptured by it, moving the chair to one side, then the other, then back and forth, making a racket I knew was calculated to upset me and stir my annoyance until I boiled over and relieved her. I did not let that happen. For in truth I was afflicted with something I can’t describe — perhaps a human embarrassment. Finally, she came outside and sat down beside me, eager for me to let fly at her in rage. Still, I didn’t. She tried to goad me.

“How do you like the new floor?” She gave a sweet, punishing emphasis to each of the words.

I would not be trapped so easily. I nodded and said nothing. Even when she asked me so many times that it grew insulting, I could not respond. As the day dwindled, the sun from the west intensified beneath low clouds and picked out the undersides of all the leaves in gold. Margaret asked me again and again. I remained silent. Finally she quit talking and sat next to me as the light darkened in the trees.

The blue came out of the bushes. The black came out of the earth. The night was windless, moonless. I wanted to forgive her. Several times I tried to speak. But I never found the words.

T HE BOY refused to wean himself and wouldn’t be coaxed onto a bottle or even a cup. He stumbled to his mother and threw himself into her lap. Even yanked at the buttons of her shirt and bawled in fury until she gave in and allowed him to suck. She indulged him, I thought, a bit too long for decency, but that could hardly be helped as he was so adamant. He yelled when she refused him. His roar was of a bullish intensity that filled the house with growling echoes. But when allowed the breast, he closed his eyes, clung to her with sweet trust, and was the picture of such relieved desperation that I could not imagine refusing him myself.

When he was satisfied and when he was rapt in his play, I don’t believe there ever was a prettier or more loving child. Oh, he didn’t like to speak, but why should he? Every need of his was anticipated and then met before it even formed in his mind. He walked and ran and even pulled himself up the stairs at a precocious number of months. His teeth came in and shone like pearls. His hair grew long, we clipped it, then it grew in thicker yet and in summer turned a surprising pale flax color. He wore skirts and gowns. It hurt us when we had to put him in boy pants at the insistence of his father. To watch Fleur dote upon him warmed me. She was sad as I was at each sign of babyhood put away, and if he didn’t speak at two years it concerned us less than it concerned his father. Fleur and I and the boy understood one another to such perfection that words were utterly unnecessary. We could play for hours in the wide sun-filled nursery and in the zoo and parks. That was true happiness. The boy brought it out of us.