Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

These were good times. These were the sorts of jobs I liked— catching food, visiting about, eating roast partridges. Whenever I returned with a load of quills or bird bones, Margaret rewarded me in ways I can only dream of, now, looking back. Gizhe Manito had smiled on me then and smoothed my way. I had lived through great sorrows and, as though to reward me, I was given for that short time all I needed for happiness. But such times are brief. We should never think happiness will last. We shouldn’t chase it, for the faster we do the faster it recedes. I was happy all through the making of that dress, so I suppose that proves its power. But maybe, with Margaret, with the treasure of our love, I tried too hard to hold on to what is only fleeting, and fragile, and I destroyed it with my clumsy ways.

IF ONLY Nector hadn’t come home again, things would perhaps have gone on forever in a pleasant dream. I wanted to live in love until Margaret and I faded into the next world, worn smooth and transparent by the rubbing of skin on skin. I wanted nothing but the happiness of falling asleep in each other’s arms, craved only the calm discriminations of old age manaa. But there was Nector one afternoon, sitting on a rock beside the door eating bannock. Margaret beamed down on him like the moon. I was glad to see Nector as if he were my own son, for we understood things in a similar fashion. He was smart, and for sure, he’d grown up to arrange the features of his mother and father in the best possible combination. All the girls admired his looks. It was my task to keep him from falling prey to vanity — an uncle’s responsibility.

“All that manaa you’re having is making you thin,” I said, “the bones are poking through your skin. Most unattractive.”

“Just one bone counts,” he glanced down, “with women.”

“More like a rope,” I said, critical, “a short little piece.”

“Yours is,” laughed Nector, stuffing a huge grease-covered chunk of pikwezhigan into his mouth. “Bread and lard make you hard,” he mocked in a singsong voice.

“Neither one of you have much to brag of,” said Margaret, sitting down with us. “Women come to you out of pity.” But she smiled at me from the corner of her eyes to let me know that this was not the case. My heart swelled up. That moment was very dangerous. I experienced a collision of desires. First, I wanted to make the moment last with Margaret, in the hope it would lead to other things. She had been generous two nights ago. Would my luck hold out? Second, I wanted to keep on teasing Nector, for his own good. Third, what was it? I couldn’t remember. An old man’s thoughts fly in and out of his head. Oh yes. There was something I had to avoid, like a treacherous rock. It could rip the bottom of my boat. But it was hidden. I couldn’t recall in that moment exactly what I was attempting to avoid and so like someone trying to steer away I instead disremembered the place and was drawn right to it.

“You’re pretty good at snaring women,” I said to Nector, “but you can’t keep them, I hear.”

As soon as I said the word, I remembered with a jolt of panic, snare, snare, snare ! Immediately, my brain spun. I tried to throw down a distracting piece of nonsense about the famous quality of Margaret’s bannock, praised it loud, out of desperation, but Nector had already seized on the word I feared.

“Snaring?” he began to laugh.

“I can’t hold myself back!” I cried, lunging over him, “I must have yet another piece of this bread. Old woman, you have a way with your cooking that—”

“Snares you every time,” said Nector, feeling hilarious. “That reminds me—”

“Gego!” I cried out, hoping he’d recall that I had requested his silence on the long-ago incident I knew he’d just remembered. “Aaargh!” I fell upon the ground, as though unconscious, and began to writhe and moan. They disregarded me except to find in my agony a source of humor.

“Look how the old man pretends he’s poisoned. Very funny. He does this all the time,” said Margaret fondly.

“He’s a sly one,” said Nector, approving of me, too. “Remember how he once snared Clarence Morrissey? He showed me how to set the wire and the two of us waited in the bush until we caught the dog. The Morrissey nearly choked to death, but found a toehold at the last moment. Of course, back then the old man told me to keep it a secret.”

Nector looked uncertainly at Margaret, whose mouth had dropped open and then slowly shut to a line. “I was just a boy,” he went on, nervously, “but now, what does it matter?” Nector noticed I had gone stiff on the ground. I was playing dead.

“Look, he’s playing dead,” he tried to change Margaret’s focus. “Convincing, isn’t he?”

“It won’t be play for long” was Margaret’s answer.

Then silence. I waited for her blows to fall upon me where I lay defenseless and stupid. But she did nothing, which made me even more afraid. I opened my eyes a crack, and my terror was confirmed. From the set of her mouth and the flash in her eyes, I knew she understood all and was reserving punishment. Mere browbeating, tongue lashing, ass kicking, and starvation of an old man would not be enough. She gave a chilly little grin, rose, and turned her back on the two of us.

“It is time for me to rest my old bones,” I said in despair. Then I crawled into the corner of the house and burrowed under a heap of blankets. I covered my face, bit my tongue, and turned to the wall. There, I prayed to the spirit of the turtle.

“Come help me,” I called on my dodem, the mekinak. “Not to stick out my head, my arms, my feet, my tail or niinag.” I thought that if I could only contain myself and stay beneath the covers, Margaret might progress to the end of her anger and find there a morsel of tenderness. The good priest tells us that miracles are part of ordinary life, but not for the lazy or the wicked, and I was both according to the Catholics. As it turned out, I was bound to suffer. To absorb a hard medicine. And Margaret knew exactly what to cook up for the poor old man and how to deliver it most drastically.

So I had snared her. She would snare me right back. We both knew that she was doing it and both of us knew why, but neither of us had the courage to dismantle the barrier of hard sticks, pointed words, and prickles of jealousy that soon tangled like deep bush between us. I knew she had divined the true prey of that snare I’d set, figured out the reason I tried to kill him, and decided to resurrect my jealousy and use Shesheeb as a weapon. Although I was aware of her ploy, I couldn’t help her scorn from cutting, or the thorns of her words from piercing deep.

One night, she hummed in an irritating manner, beneath her breath. “Ninimoshe,” she finally let me hear her singing, “sweet-heart, little duck, speak softly, for my old man will hear you creeping underneath my blanket.”

Of course, after that I tossed all night, at each little noise, imagining the absurd picture of the greasy old duck sneaking into our cabin. Now that she slept across the room from me, such a thing was remotely possible. I began to sleep by the door, but then I feared the window. The upshot was I got no sleep at all.

“People say they know the old man down the road,” she said to me slyly the next day, “but not as I do. His powers are significant. Why, he can turn himself into a fly, buzz about, listen in on people.”

I tried to bite my tongue, to keep my temper from flaring up. A fly! Saaah! That time, I succeeded. But other times I did not. She laughed, now, when I insisted on accompanying her to Holy Mass. For years, she had begged my presence, hoping to convert one more soul for Father Damien and lure me into a church marriage. Now she refused to let me walk beside her.