Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

He took up wandering, from one house to another, always sent to the next place, until he came to us. My family took him in for a short time, to our sorrow. I remember the sap was running when he got his name. My father wore two earrings, and bending over the boiling sap one fell off into the kettle. He didn’t notice until the boy who was staying with us reached in to grab it. His hand plunged down. He let out a sly and greedy quack. The noise startled us. He made the sound again, looking at his boiled hand, the earring. Quack! And so Shesheeb was named for the black duck, greasy and sly.

How he got my sister to marry him, I don’t know. For he grew up to look like a duck, fat and juicy, with a potbelly and a broad, flat nose, a shovel face, gleaming feathers for hair and a bowlegged hunch. His eyes used to be small and bright, though it was said that now he was almost blind. His laugh was doubtless the same sardonic quack he used when, much younger, he had struck his young wife with a burning stick. The blow marked the side of my sister’s lovely face with a knot of flesh that grew darker and darker, until it swallowed her. Then came the winter of our last starvation, when she disappeared. I know what happened. The truth is this: Shesheeb went windigo. That he killed and ate my sister was never proved in a whiteman’s court, so he went free. But the rest of us knew.

Shesheeb married into the Lazarres. He dragged his second wife out onto the plains, into Bwaan country. So he was yet aligned with them, and now, he had come back to doctor them and to lead them in their opposition to all I stood for on the council, as the tribal chairman, and as myself.

Ever since the first snow, he had settled down the road in a little gray house that used to belong to Iron Sky. How he put his hands on her tiny, handsome, tidily kept place I do not know. But from there, I could sense him. He was a splinter in my foot that pierced me when I stepped down hard. A darkness that rose just beyond the edges of the woods. I could feel him out there and I could smell his charred feathers. Crippled in one foot, he limped and duckwalked through the bush gathering black medicines. Lazarres came visiting him, but they avoided Kashpaw ground. And from his front door, from wherever he could, the old dog tried to steal my Margaret.

Margaret’s churchgoing piety dictated that she always beat Father Damien to Mass, and her tendency to scold and worry always made her late in leaving me. Therefore, it was her habit to take shortcuts across the land of Shesheeb, to pass near his cabin. More than once, she had returned with a report that he’d tried to waylay her with clever talk. Maybe he needed someone to keep his old bones warm in his cold winter blankets. Or perhaps he had seen her once too often, noticed the bold secret of her look, felt the prickle of her provocative scorn.

“You stay away from him today,” I warned her as she put warm wrappings on her legs and bundled on her heaviest coat.

Margaret’s gaze sharpened and she smiled into her beaded drawstring bag, counting the coins she was so save-y with. Her hair had not grown back as thick after her braids were severed, and her strength was less because of it, but strands of inky black still shone even in the winter light, and Margaret still possessed the mental fever that acted on me like a love charm. She blew hot, then cold, chilled me, scorched my fingers on those rare times she welcomed my touch. Never hiding her thoughts, her words were playful as arrows.

“Shesheeb?” Margaret made her voice falsely innocent. “He talks sweet to me when I pass by, I like the things he says.”

I gripped the knob of my willow stick, thrust it hard at the swirling pattern of Margaret’s floor.

“Don’t poke my linoleum!”

“Your linoleum, your spanking new linoleum, that’s all I hear! What does the stringy old duck tell you?”

“He says I have a round cheek,” she explained with some pride. “I have a young walk, my legs look plump, my thighs sweet and tender.”

“He’s just hungry.” I dragged my stick in a deliberate scrape and banged it on the floor to anger her. “Besides, I’ve heard the old prick’s half blind.” She kicked my cane from my hands.

“The only stiff thing you own!”

Margaret puckered up her lips and left me, her walk swift and firm. Shesheeb was right about her cheek and legs and thighs, and I was wrong not to follow her that day. For maybe he got an answer, a glance from her eye that encouraged him, a pout from those lips he would probably call juicy, though toward me they were thin, set, and stern. Maybe that, or Shesheeb could have done some darker work. It could be that he hid a love packet in the snow of the path she walked — clippings of his hair and nails, the coughball of an owl, Margaret’s and his own hair twisted together. Stepping over it, perhaps Margaret felt a low warmth, a hot breath along her neck, a chinook wind flowing through her arms, her blood, an early spring. I could see it! Her thoughts melted and softened, too sudden. She raised her basket and sang an old French tune.

The time she was gone to Mass lengthened and its passage seemed too slow. I tried singing. I tried chopping wood. I tried to distract myself by drumming and then by mudding the log sides of our cabin. But my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy. And then, when she finally returned with the smell of incense in her clothes, I watched her with close, testing eyes. I thought that she looked too cheerful — in her cheeks wild roses flushed. Winter chinook, for sure, I decided in an inner fury. He’d used his love ways, his bad old powers on her, used his clever tonics and suggestions, or that black stare from under his eyebrows said to draw women to him like chaff to a knife.

That night Margaret turned her back to me as we lay wrapped in our blankets. She knocked my hand off her breast, pressed her lips shut against my kiss. I couldn’t sleep, and so I was alert when in her dreams she mumbled something slow and soft that could have been his name. Shesheeb! Hearing that, I sprang up, away from her side, my throat choked with blazing poison. Again, I was young and hot-blooded, ready to grab and kill with my bare hands. Of course, he wasn’t in reach and in fact I wasn’t even sure I’d read Margaret’s sigh correctly with my fuzzy hearing. Still, in my doubt, I was unable to settle next to her in peace and so I went out the door. The night cold was deep, the icy wind dry and sharp. I breathed desperate, cold drafts, sucking in the air. At last, a calmer, puzzled spot cracked open deep in my heart, and I remembered my sister.

IN THAT MONTH of the year when the snow is rotten and the deer starve, Shesheeb had come to court my sister. She was round as a prairie hen, with a surprised mouth, always laughing and curious. Her eyes were soft and wondering. Simple ways, she had her simple ways. Fifteen summers she had bobbed on the stalk of her family like a sweet blossom, unfolding her petals. Fifteen autumns had taught her sorrow and to work hard, to put away all she could save for the winter. Fifteen springs she had budded with tender inner life. But the year of Shesheeb would teach her more than I know, even now, when I have seen four seasons go around fifty times and more.

I was only one year older, so she and I shared a mind. Children do that when they are left alone to dream up their games. I was half grown before I knew her feelings weren’t my feelings, her thoughts were not my thoughts, her laugh came out of her mouth alone and not mine. Still, the closeness lingered, so that when Shesheeb came calling, slouching in to sit near her on the ground, sliding his finger up her arm, darting his eyes down the side of her throat until her cheeks went hot, I understood her fascination. Hated, but understood. The mind of my sister was beautifully wound, a fine skein, a perfect spool. Shesheeb took hold of the end of the string and then, slowly, he unraveled her.