Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

I SHOOK my head to clear it of old sorrows. My thoughts came up out of my mind like the steam from a bear’s winter den. I tried to calm myself. Perhaps I gave Shesheeb too much credit for his powers. Perhaps he was not as clever as I feared. There was no sound in the woods and it was perfectly dark. Tonight, at least, the old man traveled in no ball of light. I heard no evil calls or whistles of medicine pitched out from his direction. It occurred to me that perhaps I should look at Shesheeb’s return in a different way. What if I began to view the old man from a position of strength? What if I had drawn him back to me in order to take vengeance? What if I triumphed? These were sudden and heady thoughts. In the black silence of the night they made my blood hot, my eye keen. I tasted fresh blood and I saw my enemy in pain, begging for his life.

I would medicine him, poison him, kill him. I knew how to do it from the old man who taught me everything — Mirage. Right then, right there, I sat down. I planned my medicines. I even mixed some from a pouch and the ground beside me, for I knew a recipe. That night, I sent the greasy old duck, Shesheeb, a dream in which his penis hopped off his body then became a cricket and was snapped up by a thrush as he lunged to save it. A dream where his rear end spoke and his lips were sealed. Where the road turned to stew and he bent to eat it and broke his few remaining precious teeth on the rocks. I went further. The blackness overcame me then. I sent a dream where I sank my teeth into his throat and ripped through his guts with claws grown as sharp as an eagle’s. I laughed without mercy and crushed him with my slow weight. I tied him up and spat on him. I humbled him. I devoured him and I spat out the bones.

When morning came I made my way back into the cabin to crawl, spent from my imaginary victories, into bed beside Margaret. My mind was still crowded with ghosts. But thinking of my sister had strengthened my heart. I would not be beaten. Not again. Not this time. I would save Margaret whether she liked it or not.

THE NEXT MORNING was the Feast Day of some purse-mouthed saint or other, and to the surprise of Margaret, I was nothing but pleasant as she readied herself for Mass. Even when she put on her great black coal-hod bonnet, the one she believed gave her an irresistible allure, I only complimented her.

“It casts a mysterious shadow upon your face,” I said. “It makes a man wonder just what you might do next.”

“This, probably,” she said, and whacked my shin with the stick she used for walking. But I could tell she was unnerved by my sudden too-affable acceptance of her flirtation. Maybe she was even disappointed. For sure, as she left the cabin, she was just a little anxious, since she may have sensed the cold truth of what my plan called for. Having taken advantage of the situation, having decided to turn things my way, I decided to use Margaret as bait.

I would ruin him before he harmed her. I would wreck him with my power. Already, he was probably sick and reeling from the dreams he’d suffered. He hadn’t a hope once I started on him in earnest with my medicine. Now, before Margaret put on her old gray wool blanket coat, I took from my sack of powders and teas a packet that held the gall of a mink. A pinch of that mixed with ground mica, so his eye would be dazzled. The ashes of two dogs killed in copulation. I dusted the back of Margaret’s coat, as she walked out, with the deadly attractant. I hoped that when he made a false move, and she lambasted him, she’d not only leave a mark but he would leave something with her. I needed a swatch of hair, a button, a few threads of his clothing, something he wore close to his body, in order to best him.

Now I have hardly ever had to fiddle with dark medicine, and I didn’t feel that good about using Margaret. But an old man who has survived this long does so at some risk to his principles. I couldn’t afford to stack myself above the problem when the stakes were the woman I loved.

I sat on my bench just outside the cabin door where I could see the crossroads and while she was gone I anxiously watched the world pass by. There went George Bizhiew with his blood palomino. There went Short Little Sweetheart. There went Mrs. Cardinal. I waited. I tried to let my mind travel after Margaret, but I think she knew it. She blocked my vision. Hung a curtain down across my sight. For I was left in a dark frustration until at last I saw the black curve of her bonnet as she returned through the scrub oak and alder that grew across the road.

She wasn’t steaming forward in a heat of indignation. She wasn’t in a cold and offended dudgeon. She wasn’t in a fury of motion and she didn’t poke at me with her stick or make a single sharp comment as she passed by me and into the house. I heard the scrape of pots, her careful arrangements as she prepared to cook. I stood behind her, examining her back for signs of Shesheeb. But there was nothing. Not one hair. Had he made a move on her? Had the bait worked? I couldn’t tell, and finally gave up. She served me food. I tasted cautiously. I tasted with careful thought. And what I tasted was not the careless and bitter old porridge she’d serve to me when angry, nor was it the succulent tidbit she’d save in the lean-to for those rare times I fell into her favor.

That afternoon, Margaret cooked me a decent stew composed of a rabbit she had snared and skinned just that morning. She boiled it with an onion, a few potatoes, a can of Red Jacket Beans, and a little bacon and pepper just for seasoning. I ate the first bite with curiosity, the next with gratitude, and joy, but every spoonful after that with increasing suspicion.

This was all too much the stew of a dutiful wife, which Margaret was not. The rabbit indicated humble industry on her behalf, planning, forethought. She must have set her snare last night and risen very early to check it. For days before that, even, she must have followed and noted the trails of rabbits. The can of beans had been waiting on our shelf for an occasion. And the onion. Where had she hidden such a thing? Had she perhaps brought it home from Mass in the cup of her bonnet? Was it a prize acquired from the nuns? Or was it, and here a bleak pang of outrage choked me, could this onion be a little love gift, an offering, a sly come-hither threat from Shesheeb?

I put my spoon down. My blood was thickening in my veins. My voice went ragged with fearful speculation. I should have kept my mouth shut, but couldn’t help myself.

“There is dirt in this stew,” I said to Margaret.

She shook her head as though she couldn’t have heard right, and then gave me a sour but still friendly look, as though my little joke had missed its mark. That was when I should have stopped. But then I tasted the potatoes. They were soft on my tongue, silken with gravy. I couldn’t remember where we kept the potatoes, whether we had potatoes, if potatoes had ever been inside our house, or within my reach, or if they ever existed anywhere on earth.

“Rotten to begin with!” My voice came out a shriek. Jealousy, that spider, sank its fangs in my heart. I jumped up and began accusing Margaret of small things and, when she laughed in contempt, of large and then outrageous things I knew were far beneath her. “And if you think that this stew will quench my fire,” I finished, “you are mistaken. I will definitely kill that greasy duck.”

Margaret calmly rose, took the stew outside, and dumped it. “For the dogs,” she said. “They deserve it more than you.”

I sat down, my face to the wall, trying to contain myself. I hadn’t thought that she would dump the stew, which was, after all, delicious. We so rarely had anything good to eat that her action shocked me back into my senses, as it was meant to. Only by exercising the utmost restraint did I keep myself from rushing outside with my spoon, beating off the dogs, scooping what was left into my mouth before it soaked into the earth. It took more effort yet to keep from expressing my regrets about my hasty words. To apologize to Margaret was to give her a sharper knife to cut me with, and since the whole thrust of my life was to dull her blade, I shut my mouth.