Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

“An inhuman presence,” he told me carefully. “I hesitate to assign God the tedious task of looking after me, but I’ve come to believe that I’ve been spared death many times in narrow circumstances by something, for something. For some reason.”

I sat alertly. “I would like to hear it.”

“Perhaps it is not for me to understand. If so, may it remain shrouded. But I have been spared, or rescued, or brought back to life, many times. When I was a boy, for instance, I fell through the ice of a deep pond and was known to have been submerged for nearly half an hour before I was dragged out. I came to. I survived that and I was only four years old. When I was a young hooligan I jumped a train but judged wrong and fell beneath it, managed to roll out between the wheels. Don’t know how I did it. Unscathed. And then in my lumbering days a Swede dropped a pine on me. Sure, it should have killed me. But two jagged branches that might have run me through pinned me beneath the trunk, supporting it so that I was merely tapped down a little into the soft duff. I fell off a scaffold once and was caught by the belt and hung there, sixty feet off the ground. I married Placide and on our wedding day the horses spooked and ran straight over me, you remember. Not one hoof mark. Stood and brushed myself off. There was the bullet Fantan took for me in the can of sardines.”

“What?” I said.

“A long story for another time.” He waved that off. “And then there was my long illness after I’d so ridiculously gone to war. I did some terrible things in my younger days and was always surprised and suspicious that luck seemed to reward rather than punish me. But now I think perhaps luck was just saving for my comeuppance. Or that the just desserts that skipped over me were visited upon my son.”

There she is, I thought the next day, watching from a nursery window as Fleur emerged from the car below. His comeuppance. It startled me to think like that, but the fact is, Mauser’s history had made me shiver. It rang true. I have stopped believing in a divine lookout, but Mauser’s luck was striking, or had been, until the grotesque collapse of his illness. And when Fleur cured him, I wondered now, was that a piece of good fortune or was it the beginning of a subterranean justice that now started, one catastrophe and then the next, to bring him down?

His investments began to fail. A lead mine collapsed. Securities he’d thought invulnerable to the world’s flux proved otherwise. A fertilizer plant he’d owned closed and he had to sell off those lands he’d acquired by means underhanded, anyway. He was unnerved, I could see it, uncertain. Even after he came home at night, he closeted himself for hours with his accountant. When he emerged he wore a desperate, foraging look. Still, an edifice of money built as large as Mauser’s, one that withstood all the world’s undoing, doesn’t go all at once. The daily features of life seemed changeless. The household still functioned with its usual extravagance and Mrs. Testor continued her profitable ways with the meats. Fleur’s account at the dress shop was paid and the couple still appeared at social events. With her hair piled high, she still displayed the bold profile and predatory grace of a swooping bird. Mauser, although he cut as fine a figure, wore an increasingly haunted look, though maybe hunted is the better word.

MY LOVE for the boy, and the fact that I’d succeeded in drawing Mauser out on the subject of his religious habits, broke some ice between the two of us. Still, the old animosity I’d felt for his lurking manservant persisted until one day I asked about a detail of conversation that remained odd to me — Mauser’s mention of the can of sardines and the bullet. I then was told the story of the way the two men forged their bond.

We sat together in the breakfast room, in pale light, our coffee on delicate gold-rimmed saucers. I wondered if he might sell them to me when the house went, then quashed my greedy thought. Mauser lighted a small cheroot and began to speak.

“My war starts with a can of sardines, a small can, unworthy of mayhem. I see it sitting in the dim illumination, there on the low table, its wrapper a bright yellow, cheerful, centering the group of men.”

He tapped the cigar. I let him go on, didn’t stop as he waxed thoughtful.

MOLES, human gophers, that’s what we were. Burrowing creatures. I loved the dirt, craved the solid gray promise of it, nosed into the cold black safety, set my shoulders into the swing of the pick, the shovel, or dug with my face when the shelling commenced. Fantan too, here, he can tell you we loved dirt. I don’t care if it was wet or dry or stank of human rot. Life in the trenches fostered adoration of the muck and the shit of survival. Don’t make a face! Queen Polly Elizabeth! I swear you’re a Brit, a throwback, you and your conflagrate them flower beds laid out in rows.

I first got over there. I thought to myself, why, these British, they’re short ! They were lean as weasels, too, my God, sunk in the chest and small. I thought they picked out the little ones to live in these dugouts, or maybe they were stunted by island living somehow. Come to find out, it wasn’t any of my theories that held the reason I stood a head at least over even the tallest Englishman. Quite simply, the tallest had been slaughtered first. The British Recruiting Office had been forced to lower their requirements from five foot eight, I believe it was when the war began, to five foot three by the time Lloyd George started the conscription. So there I was, and Fantan, easy targets and easy picking.

“If this goes on,” I said to him one foul afternoon, “think about the future of the English as a breed. The French too, I suspect. Darwin would say it is survival of the measliest. Maybe all of Europe, if it isn’t one big crater, will be composed of miniature, clever, tunneling folk. Of course, there are the women, the fair and stalwart mothers and widows, as the newspapers call them back home. They’ll tower. They’ll lambaste and dominate. They’ll thrive. They’ve not been culled for height or for intelligence yet. They are the ones who will run things.”

Fantan concurred, agreeable then as he is now, although of course very different, my dear. I say you’re British with your flowers because once I got there, moved into the trenches you see, and began to understand what a drunk fool I’d been to recruit myself, the other item that astonished me about the British was their stubborn passion for the civilized bloom. Our first shelter, which we tried absurdly to make comfortable, was actually decorated all around the door with the trained vine of a climbing sweet pea. The girlfriend of some poor poetic cluck had sent the seeds on his request. He was blown to literal pieces before the show of the first bud, so it was left for the rest of us to enjoy the bower. The damn blossoms were enormous, hot pink, lavender, and white, fertilized by human guts.

Oh, you’ve gone pale green, Polly Elizabeth. Your mother wouldn’t have sat still this long. But you feel sorry for me, don’t you, or is it something else? I know you’re sick to the gills of Fantan, of putting up with him. You want to know why I brought him back, of course, and why I won’t let you, any more than I permitted your mother, toss him to the church or the veterans’ ward. You want to know how I won him, or he won me, or we became possessed of each other. Since you can’t ask him, you’re asking me. I’ll answer, too, it’s easy. A can of sardines.

All right, then, another coffee, that will do.

The sardines had got to be a kind of joke in the lulls. There were these times when not much went on beyond the pounding of guns, the sniping, and the occasional man hit north or south of you. There were evenings we sat in the dugout, which we’d banked well and scratched deeper and deeper into the earth and improved, even with a scrap of rug, a crate, a table of sorts, so that we thought our burrow was pretty grand — spacious and well concealed and snug. There were these two men, a couple, mates they called themselves, like Fantan and me. Bert Chiswick and Mr. Dragon were their names. The two thought themselves mighty clever when it came to bridge, which I despise. But we played it with them, had to before they would put themselves out for whist, pinochle, or especially poker, which from his name you might infer my friend Fantan knew a great deal more than a little something.