Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

PERHAPS my understanding came about at Fleur’s expense, for as I see it now, she was not happy. She was more trapped than in control, even with the position she had gained as Mauser’s wife. Between the two of them, laughter ceased. There was a humming tension, an electric shadow. It was not a thing I wished to investigate or understand, but I had no choice in it once I placed myself firmly in the household. I would know the truth of their marriage whether or not I wanted to. I thought of course that the pain John James Mauser admitted to about the boy, the anguish that drove him to Holy Mass, was the source of all that was wrong between them. I had no idea, for instance, that Fleur knew that Mauser had wronged and stolen and gained his fabulous position in the first place by obtaining false holdings in northern Minnesota. I didn’t think she knew he’d cut the last of the great pine forests there, thousands of acres, or that he’d left behind a world of stumps and then sold the land off cheap.

We had progressed to the point of speaking about it, Mauser and I, and I did tell him that I thought it a blessing that Fleur had no idea where his fortune had originated.

“Oh, but she does know,” he said. We were sitting together in his library one night, and he was brooding over a bottle of old brandy he’d fetched from the cellar. He had asked me to sit with him. I felt there was something he wanted to tell me and there would be some roundabout way of getting at it.

“Fleur knows?”

“I’m just one of an army of swindlers and scavengers,” he laughed shortly, giving me a long look underneath his eyebrows. “I’ve got the misfortune, perhaps, to have understood at last what I’ve done. She has let me know full well the misery I left behind. She has told me that she expects I’ll sell this house, that I’ll give her the automobile she covets, and our son. Our son! She tells me that she expects that I will restore her land and give her all of my money.”

I thought I’d heard what I’d heard, but I made him repeat the whole thing.

“Why, you can’t do that,” I said, oddly moved by her faith. I think I spoke somewhat wistfully, as though it was possible, after all, for a man like Mauser to go broke through the exercise of sheer moral principles.

“Of course not, but she doesn’t understand. Even if I did have the money, which I don’t anymore, I could hardly make restitution to a people who’ve become so depraved. I know the folly of those people up there now! The old type, the old warrior type, they are gone. Only the wastrels, the dregs of humanity left, only the poor toms have survived. Even she left. I point that out to her. The reservations are ruined spots and may as well be sold off and all trace of their former owners obliterated. That’s my theory. Let the Indians drift into the towns and cities or subsist where they will. Thinking their tribes will ever be restored is sheer foolishness. There’s nothing left!”

Mauser shook his head, and puffed away on his cigar to form a melancholy cloud that stopped above his head.

“I don’t think she wants to kill me anymore,” he said. “That’s one thing. She can’t. In some interior way — I cannot grasp it, I don’t even experience it — she has developed a form of love for me. I call it love, anyway, though I suspect it is more like pity. Kindness. Some honor in her that won’t permit my death at her hand. I meditate on this — it’s strange! I could feel her hatred of me change with the birth of the boy.”

“She hated you?” I said this in an aghast tone, but a split second later I was of course not surprised, thinking, yes, of course she hated you. She came here hating you. I see that now. Her dark figure on that white, white day. A cipher. A keyhole. I was the one who admitted her into this house. It was no accident. She found you because she wished to destroy you but then she started healing you and found that once she’d healed you she could not kill you. For who can destroy what one has put back together with such care? And then the boy — you after all are the father of her son. She loves him. Therefore, she can’t kill you. So she is trapped. I said this last sentence aloud. He did not acknowledge it, though I know he heard.

“Of course she hated me. She came here to skin me and had a very sharp knife to do it with. But the whiskey got her, as it does so many of her people. It will waste her in a few years. Already, she’s gotten careless. It won’t be long.”

“How can you speak in such a heartless fashion?” I was angry. “You profess to love her, and yet you will watch her be destroyed.”

“There is no helping her, don’t you see? The stuff is poison to them. It’s their downfall. They’d have beaten us back and kept their lands if it wasn’t for the liquor. They can’t help it. One taste, one teaspoon of it, and they’re utterly doomed.”

Now he forgot to smoke his sad cigar. Real feeling seized him. His eyes whelmed with felt tears and he looked at me with something like appeal.

“I almost wish she would kill me,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I cannot watch the wreck she will become. She’s caught me somehow.” He touched the breast of his jacket, softly, with the tips of his fingers. “It isn’t just her face, either, or the figure she cuts. It isn’t that I married her for notoriety, as some say, but only that I couldn’t bear not to have her near. God,” his voice went ragged. “I had to have her and I swear to you there was no other way. Only now do I understand that I had to get near something in her that I can’t know, some pure space, something that I went up north to have and only ended up destroying. It is the same with her,” he nearly wailed, and then I thought, oh, he feels sorry for himself . He regained control and spoke with a surface sincerity. “I am a greedy man. I have always been a greedy man and always wanted to live like this”—he waved his arm around the oak-paneled room—“and now I do, for the next few months anyway. After that, I think…”

“What,” I said, knowing this was where he’d wanted to lead me. “Tell me the worst!”

“I think it’s all gone. I think you must find yourself a new place to live. Go back to your sister.”

I took that in. The fire crackled in the hearth. I gestured to my glass and he poured out fingers of brandy for us both.

“Fleur is my sister, now,” I said. “I think I’ll cast my lot with her.”

Mauser looked at me in astonishment. His mouth actually dropped open. He gave a bark of laughter. “She’ll go back! She’ll go back there to live, I suppose! I have nothing. I plan to leave the country with all that I can pry from my bankers before the great rout, and she refuses to come with me.”

“She probably misses her family,” I said sharply to him, trying to fight off my appalled shock. The world, indeed, was breaking apart. I could function only by remaining dry and allowing my old vinegar into my voice.

“Her family?” Now he laughed a good deal longer. “She hasn’t any. She’s the last of them.”

“Well, she’s got me now,” I said, rising, rustling my skirt. I seemed to grow taller in my own skin. “If she’ll have me, she’s got Miss Gheen.”

M ARGARET SLOWLY and methodically began to gather the materials that she would use in making the medicine dress. Just as she had said, nothing upon it could be made by a whiteman, which was not easy as chimookomaanag popped up everywhere — stole the land next door and put a farm on it, walked the agency town’s streets, even prayed in our missionizing church. Margaret couldn’t use glass beads to decorate her dress, but as in the old days she must use deer clackers, teeth, quills, and the bones of small birds. This required the painstaking hunting of those animals, which I did with a good will, as I thought my efforts might redeem me from the terrible mistake of the snare. Bine, or partridge, sat juicy in the comfort of the tree branches. I knew how to catch them with a wire hooked to the top of a long pole. Plucked and roasted, the birds were delicate meat, sweet and tender. I also let it be known that I was collecting these bird bones, and would be glad to clean up the remnants of various partridges cooked throughout the reservation.