Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

“That is a very good question.

“Some of you are my friends, and some of you are my enemies. I make no distinction, but tell the truth no matter who you are. Whether you love me or hate me does not affect my story. Although I have faith in the old ways, I finally was persuaded to try the Eucharist last night. Father Damien and my dear wife have been after me for years to receive the benefit of the whiteman’s God, and at last, I did give in to their wishes. In one night, I made up for all of the years of the blood of Christ that I had missed. I drank a whole keg. Inspired by the sacramental wine, and perhaps a little mad, I persuaded my wife to let me wear her holy dress. In her compassion for me, she gave it up, saying that it contained a powerful medicine that might work with the wine to give me insight and wisdom into the grave problem now before us.

“I am not afraid, as others may be, that my manhood will be compromised by such a little thing as wearing a skirt. My manhood is made of stiffer stuff. No, I was not concerned for that. Rather, I worried that I, like so many other men who boast of their superiority and revel in their brute strength, cleverness, or power, was unworthy to wear the dress of a woman.”

Here I paused. I took a close look at my crowd. My initial impression — that it was composed of two women to every one man — was confirmed. I went on.

“We call the earth Grandmother. We ask her help when times are difficult. When we are lonely, or harrowed by death, we throw ourselves upon her and weep onto her breast. All that we are and all that we survive upon comes from the Grandmother. There is nothing she does not provide. But there is a limit to everything, even your grandma’s patience. How many of you have had a spoon thrown at your head? When I donned my wife’s dress, I admit that I was at first defiant and, as I have confessed to you, quite drunk. But the dress itself is sacred as you know, and even though I am a clever fool it stopped my thoughts and humbled me and made me listen.

“It wasn’t that the dress spoke to me. It was that my ears were opened to hear all I missed when I was arrayed like a man.

“Listen, old fool, I heard the earth tell me. You are walking on my beautiful body. And I allow it — not because you are a human and not because you are a man — but because you were born of a woman. I, the earth, respect a woman’s pain as it is freely given to the service of life. The only time you men suffer is when your bellies are stretched too full from the food your wives cook for you. Hear me out, you poor, split creature! Poor man, decorated with a knob and a couple of balls! You’re only here on my patience and on the patience of women. What would you do, the earth asked me laughingly, if all women of the world closed their legs to men? Die out, that’s what. So with my generous nature. I have given you all that you have. You owe your life to me.

“Now I ask you, what have you given to me in return?”

I turned to my relatives, my people, and opened my arms wide.

“What have we given her?” To my question, there was no answer. I’d said enough. I walked off and left the assembly to ponder my words. When they voted, they rejected the land settlement. So the dress worked. The medicine was the sacred shame that it provoked in me. I was humbled, and in that mood I decided to return to Margaret. As I neared the cabin, I began an anxious series of requests, all based on my love of Margaret. I hoped she would greet me, no matter how angry. I would endure her whipping tongue, bear the bite of her disdain, if only she would be there, I thought, waiting for me whether to kiss or kill. But when I got to our little home the door was shut, the cabin empty, the stove cold, and her blanket gone. I stood in the center of the quiet, sick and wondering.

What gives us such cause to harm each other? Where do we come by the substance of our anger and pride? I had no doubt even then that Margaret loved me and I loved her. Yet as a couple our main activity, it seemed, was making each other miserable.

“Please come home,” I cried out the open door, into the bush, “and let me love you the way you deserve!”

But from the massed green leaves and the thick growing trees, there was no answer, nor from the weedy flowers or the berries or the silence of the birds. At that moment, I understood that the manidoog were tired of me, too, that I’d gone one step too far. I sank to the earth, put my head in my hands. With all my heart I wished to be forgiven. Going back through the nights and days I began to count up all I’d done to the people around me and chance passersby too. I tried to name each name, I tried to beg their mercy and humbly address each problem I’d created starting with the day I tried to snare Shesheeb. I began with good intentions, but I quickly fell asleep. The list was too long. The day too warm. The breeze so calm and golden.

T HERE WAS NO packing of the house, since its entire contents would be sold at auction. John James Mauser had fled, leaving me to clean up the copious mess of his belongings, but it was after all part of the agreement. He was to wander the earth. I was to count his handkerchiefs. After I had totaled them up I was to then mark them with a price. I would handle the sale of his accumulated goods, and with the proceeds I would satisfy as many of his creditors as I possibly could. Fleur had taken the automobile, her clothing, and the boy. They had departed before dawn and would take back roads in case they should be followed by those who were alerted to the entire desertion of John James Mauser — the abandonment of his ruined accounts and the bled carcasses of his books and the plucked spars of the solid edifice that once had been his moneyed life.

And here I was, counting handkerchiefs. To add strangeness to surprise, I was not alone. I was joined. He was polishing a table spread with silver. He had brown eyes and a smile that I now saw as one of unbounded attraction, for it was cast upon me out of love. When Fantan looked at me, the sun came out in any room, and when I looked back at him, I could feel soft fire rise in my own face. What astounding things can happen to us, what change, what absurd luck.

We’ve lost a fortune, for Mauser’s money of course was the stipend upon which my sister and I lived. But I have gained more than a fortune. I have Fantan. We have plans, grand plans. We are heading north to live in a town just outside the reservation boundary. A little place with a railroad spur and two bars, a piano shop, a newspaper, and a grain elevator. Fantan has saved a small bundle of money, and Mauser secretly added to it before he was picked clean. With it we’ve bought a share in a trading store located on the reservation. Eventually we’ll buy out the half still belonging to the old Lebanese, and then we’ll move into the store’s back rooms. We will live at the ends of the earth. We will sell dried peas and shovels. Fabric and spools of thread. I’ll train a bean vine around the back door and I’ll have a garden filled with squash. Fantan will play cards with Fleur as often as he can, and I’ll read sweet poems to the boy, no matter how big he grows.

Fantan touches my shoulder and my arm glows. My hand is in his hand. With our box of pens and tags, we’re moving on to the bedside clocks. The racks of ties. The unwrapped boxes of cigars.

All that Mauser left. Wherever I go in the house, now, Fantan is at my side and the little dog follows us both. I look down at my black Diablo, head on his paws. He is at my feet. He knows that he must trust to my forgiveness for his daily meat. So he wags his plumed tail and noses at my foot and I pat him gently. Affection, I tell him, is how a dog survives. Knowing how to exist without it is how a woman wrests her life into her own hands. But then it comes, it takes one by surprise. Affection and freedom and the will to risk. Everything that happened since I answered the door to Fleur was leading up to this. Warm sun falls on us through diamonds of lead glass as we work. If I am a fool, I am proud to be one. I have married one servant and declared another my sister. My husband and I do not speak in flows of words, but we connect by the heartstrings and by laughter and by signs. I am that rare thing thought only to exist in death. I am a happy woman.