Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

I told the dress about my vision and I skipped stones across the water of my life, described the sensation of having my head shaved by those Lazarres. I told my dress about the distinctive ways each of my babies was born — what they looked like the first time I saw them and how they grew. Where they were now — scattered to the four directions of the earth. I told the medicine dress about Nector and Eli, my so-called twins, and their miserable mistakes with women. I trusted the dress and told it about the loss of my beauty, how difficult that was for a woman who used to rely upon it. Finally, I told the dress about Nanapush, or attempted to give some idea of all he is capable of doing and thinking. I didn’t get far. Nanapush is the only man I’ve never seen entirely through, never thoroughly understood. He has loved me with all his foolish heart, which at first outraged me. But for a long time now, secretly, I’ve let myself be charmed. I told the dress that I would die with him although he is an imbecile.

NANAPUSH collected the bones of the birds I required to decorate the dress, and he roamed the bush for the roots and stems I used for dye. I cut the bones into bead lengths and made a yoke of plum, rose, softest yellow. I used red willow and chokecherry bark to dye the quills and I wove them into the dress, thinking how my words stabbed, like those quills, when my husbands got too near me. When a quill sinks in deep, there is a barb in the tip that anchors the quill so it will work its way in ever deeper, to fester and kill. Only by clipping off the end of the quill and puffing air through the hollow can the barb safely be released. I’d done it many times with a snout-poked animosh. Perhaps, I thought, I’d buried my quills too deeply by now in my last husband’s heart. The poison might have lain there too long. Things might be too far gone. I couldn’t tell. But as I worked on the dress, it seemed to work on me. I was surprised to find that when I thought back to the snare that nearly killed me, I didn’t blame Nanapush. Not in my heart. I know I had purposely quickened his jealousy, and for no reason. Like a young girl who doesn’t know any better, I was taunting him, playing with his love, twisting up the sinews of his poor old heart.

Enough, I told myself. Mi’iw. Enough.

Even when he rolled back to the cabin, drunk as the keg itself, I wasn’t angry. I never laid into him. In fact, it crossed my mind to lay otherwise, even though the old man reeked. I nearly brought him to bed. I might have. I had it in my mind. If only his arrogant ways had not surfaced, if only he hadn’t challenged me to let him dance in my dress. Sometimes, if all my patience has had no effect, my anger gets twice the better of me. So it was, I left my old man wearing the medicine dress, and started out for Shesheeb’s house. Driven to it! I told myself. Forced into the arms of someone I hated, from the arms of the man I loved!

I am too old for such dramas to be played out upon my body. For a long time now, I’ve let myself slide toward comfortable ruin without even pretending concern. Loved by Nanapush, I had a wealth that I could squander. His love oppressed me at times, but I also valued it. As I walked through the bush, I smiled to recall the absurd sight the old man cut, dancing in my dress. Rather than afflict me with fury, it made me laugh. Which is why, as I made my way through the diamond willow and around the deep slough and over the little crossing to the house of Shesheeb, even then, I knew I was bluffing. I had no wish for troubles of the heart. No wish to take revenge on my childish husband. Revenge was beneath the stature I’d found as a woman. I reached the clearing in which the old duck’s house was set, and I even sat down on a little stump at the edge and had a smoke of my pipe, which I carried with me in a pouch that hung off my belt. After a while, I saw Shesheeb come out into the yard. He poked around, stopped to scratch his old duck’s balls, and generally made himself such an unattractive prospect that I melted away from the scene.

TO LOVE Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line. Then there were times we both knew the song and love was effortless. Our old years flowed along, carrying us quickly in a rush. At least we were together, if at odds. No matter how foolishly my husband behaved, no matter how dreadful his mistakes, jokes, and sins, he loved me. In that, my suspicious woman’s heart came to trust. Somehow, between the exhaustion leveled on me by all previous men and the steady, if crazy, love-fortitude of this one, the good days came closer together for the two of us. I numbered the days on one hand and was nearly at the end of the years on the other — our lives had progressed that far — when it happened. As we always knew, as we had waited for, as was inevitable, Fleur returned.

SHE CAME BACK so rich that we didn’t know, at first, whether the slim woman in the white car, and the whiter suit fitted to the lean contours of her body, was the ghost of the girl we knew or Fleur herself. It was a dry afternoon. The dust swirled in a tan gray cloud when she stopped. Slowly, as she got out and stood beside the car, the dust settled around her feet like a dropped cape. She was left in the clear air, staring hard at the steps of the trader’s store, where I stood. When she saw me, her eye lit and she smiled — that direct punishment that men take for invitation.

Only to me it was this: acknowledgment. It was as though she and I had known this from the very beginning. It would come down to us in spite of all the men’s doings — us two women.

Then I noticed the pale blur of a face in the window of the car, and he stepped out, too, shaking his fat legs, frowning. This last time she left the reservation and returned, Fleur Pillager brought back a son. Not that we understood, at first, the connection. He seemed too soft, too baby fine, too chubby, too white, to be any son of Fleur Pillager’s, so at first gossip had it the boy was stolen goods. Kidnapped. Taken from whatever too-fine place he was spawned in return for the child Fleur had lost so long ago. The mean and envious waited, all eager, for her arrest. That never happened. The boy was big and hulking, his face was round, anxious, shut. He had not one of his mother’s features and he was spoiled. A pouter, he’d have his way or sulk for candy. We watched as he took big bites, filled his face with sweet sugar, powdery cakes, and was always seen with a bulging pocket eyeing other children with piggy suspicion.

As soon as I saw the boy, I put his presence together with what I knew of Lulu’s hatred of her mother. The story was not hard to assemble. In sorrow over losing Lulu and the tiny one besides, Fleur had warped this one. Kept him too close, plied him, spoiled him, sweeted him. None of which would have made the slightest difference to a child of strong, raw stuff. But it was clear to see that from the beginning this one was liquid dough, half baked, demanding, and full of longing. There was also damage in him not of Fleur’s own making.

Perhaps the Pillager stuff was all used up in Fleur. She was the last, and like the longest-boiled kettle of maple sap, she was the strongest and darkest. Or if the Pillager stuff had not given out, maybe it was blocked. Perhaps the spirits of all those she had sent on the death road had lined up against her on the other side. I pictured it. Drowned men glared into her cabin with dead, white eyes. Frozen men, their hair drifted over with crystals of ice, stared at her star-lashed in hollow unforgiveness. The one in the lake was jealous. My own son, Eli, would never be the same after knowing Fleur Pillager. He lived alone in the woods with only spirits for company. Had he cursed her? Had all of them? Why had she no children who’d call her mother? And now, this boy.