Louise Erdrich: Four Souls

“I must see to this new laundry woman.” My fingers steal beneath the gray horsehair beard of the troubled hesiarch.

“Your crown! You’ve tipped it! I wanted it just so,” scolds Placide. She wears her dark blond hair smooth to the head, in a simple cut, so as not to detract from what Katherine Hammond called “the purity of brow.” It was thirteen years ago, at Miss Hammond’s school, that Placide first began to realize her vocation. Painting china plates was how it started. Now, each Wednesday and Friday at noon, the painting teacher comes from the university and the two seclude themselves for hours, engrossed in an intense exploration of form and color.

“I’m tired. I have so much to do.”

“Oh well, then .” Placide bites back on her words, as if to tell me that I have once again shown my true philistine stripe, my low valuation of her talent. She thinks of very little other than the unfolding of this fascinating side of herself, this vibrational urge, as she calls it. Brother-in-law, who makes no secret of his opinions, who called Miss Hammond’s vital lessons on deportment “simpering instructions,” and referred to my mother’s discriminations and opinions as “one long swoon of platitudes,” makes short shrift of the painting teacher and the efforts of Placide. I have tried to make up for his lack of kindness by remaining still for hours, sometimes in the most excruciating attitudes, but nothing quite replaces a husband’s approval.

“Go, go,” says Placide, weary and absorbed.

I pull off the beard, put the paste crown in its hatbox, and am just about to untie brother-in-law’s quilted satin smoking jacket when I hear a sort of low howling begin, muffled and irregular. It issues from the south side of the house, the glass porch where brother-in-law sits on fine mornings and takes the strengthening light. I am up in a flash, racing downstairs for the opium bottle. My sister’s husband has little physical reserve left these days, and I must dole the medicine out according to the doctor’s orders. Fantan would simply pour the stuff down his throat and keep him stupefied, as in fact the poor man wishes. I am more judicious. At these times, all through my brother-in-law’s wasted limbs a kind of electrical fury proceeds, each nerve connected and lit up, each muscle pinched and bound. His suffering is a mystery, positively terrible to watch. He flails and runs at the mouth. He loses consciousness, whimpers like a baby or whines, and by the crablike force of his convulsed limbs makes his way under furniture, hides where he can. We believe he suffers from a neuralgia, perhaps the hitherto undetected result of deadly chlorine gas, worsening over the months.

I am, to my mind, adept at dealing with brother-in-law though he always seems to hate the fact that I’ve seen him and touched him in his state rather than allowing Fantan to administer the medicine. There is no doubt he’ll fly into a rage at me, later, but I’ve locked the medicine away in a drawer just to be sure it isn’t given on the sly. In that, my mother failed. She should have made certain long ago that brother-in-law’s deterioration was monitored — not by that strange and sorry scarecrow, but by herself. Since I’ve taken over brother-in-law’s treatment, Fantan says he’s worse, but I say that’s the illusive quality of progress. Things always seem grimmest before they vastly improve. I walk into the solarium with the bottle and the spoon, but I am met with an unexpected sight.

Speechless for a moment, I can do no more than stare.

It is the savage woman I’ve recently hired to scrub clothes, bent over brother-in-law, I don’t know how to say it, like some kind of bird. Hawk-winged and territorial, her brown skirt spread, the apron bows starched and peaked in the back like a cocked white tail, she has him laid out flat. She’s working him over, each limb. Obviously, somehow, she has quieted an arm and a leg on one side of him and now she is kneading on his thigh like the dough of a bread. His left arm pounds monotonously on the parquet tiles, beating out a rhythm I fear will break the bone until she catches the wrist and then with no waste in motion seems to wring the muscles smooth in one twist, like squeezing dry a shirt, so that all of a sudden he is calm and limp. His breath floods in and out of his chest, one huge sigh then another, and now Fantan, kneeling at my brother-in-law’s head, carefully opens the jaw and removes his own two thick, purpled fingers. He has thrust them between the teeth in lieu of a rolled cloth, for fear that in the throes of his spell my brother-in-law should bite off his own tongue.

I stand there with the bottle and spoon in my hand, quite useless, allowing the scene to resolve itself. It is over. But as I look at the back of her, at Fantan, at the heavy and relaxed form between them, words form against the inside of my skull. I can see them. They make no sense and yet compel me with their vehemence.

Polly Elizabeth , I read, you’ve been hoaxed .

I SHARED WITH Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it — we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed.

We had only the barest sympathy for those who brought our losses upon us. So when she saw the anguish of the white man, Mauser, that day, Fleur did not rush to him out of a merciful heart.

Though she swooped down in her dress with the stiff white apron wings, she did not descend to save him like an angel of zhaaginaash hope. She gathered the man to herself and fixed his thrashing limbs, smoothed the boil of his tortured blood, pried his fists open, and unstuck his tongue from the back of his throat. But she did these good things for her own benefit, not his. As she helped the cook and the manservant drag him to his bed where the sister proceeded to tie him, she thought of what she might make of that malleable substance, his suffering. How she could benefit herself.

“He must be immobilized!” the sister cried out, her jaws locked in a frenzy of righteousness. “Immobilized at once!”

The woman seemed fond of the word, as Fleur described it, and she used it constantly and made the most of it, dragging out the long o and allowing her voice to tremble on each syllable. Elizabeth used strips of cotton sheeting, bandages that she’d had Fleur tear to a precise length and then stitch with a rolled hem. Fastening the man into the bed was evidently a task that this sister accomplished with a certain pleasure. First, she fussed over the neatness of the ties and she tested the knots with a motherly frown. She plucked at the taut strips to make certain they gave the right pressure. After rounding the bed several times to measure her work, she lifted the eyelid of her brother-in-law with a pale, curved thumb. Then she made her mistake. With officious concern, she put her finger underneath his nose to ascertain that he still drew breath. When her hand passed before his mouth, he snapped at it from below the surface of his consciousness and caught her thumb neatly as a fish grabs a fly. He sank a tooth deep. Hell-shrieks! The sister’s lungs blasted an eerie steam whistle and the great round woman who did the cooking barged in. The cook seated herself directly on top of the poor man and pinched his nose shut. Which did nothing, as he breathed through his clenched teeth and through the blood of the howling sister, who beat upon him with a failing vigor until at last she collapsed in a dead faint over the cook’s lap, her finger still caught.