Louise Erdrich: Four Souls

Her head hung to her chest and she looked tired, so tired. The racks of her graceful shoulders sagged hard. I felt a wash of pity for her. But there wasn’t enough human pity in the world to help Fleur Pillager. She needed more, from another source. She needed help from her neglected spirits, and would find it only by fasting on the dark rock eight days and eight nights with all of her memories and her ghosts. “You must suffer with your relatives,” I told her. “The living and the dead.

“I am putting you out on a rock on the side of the lake,” I went on, “with nothing to help you but my medicine dress. My daughter, the sun will bake and burn you and destroy your ability to see, but this dress will save your vision so that you’ll be forced to look within. It will get worse. Stinging flies will torture your skin and the zagimeg will suck your blood. This dress will allow them to bite right through. Then it will heal your wounds so that you’ll be fresh for the insects each morning. Those tiny spirits will drive you past your limit. At night the wind will rake you, cold off the lake. The cold air will clench around your heart and you will be devoured by the cold, but this dress will not let you die. No food will pass your lips for the eight days you will lie on this rock, but this medicine dress will not let you starve to death, nor will it feed you or give you water. Every night after the fourth day I will come to you with just enough water to keep life in your body. This dress will intensify your hunger and allow you the privilege to suffer. This dress will listen to you, Four Souls, crying out for kindness and mercy in spite of your terrible will.

“Again, you will remember every dear one you lost, those you have forced yourself to forget in order to survive. You threw your souls out. You lived. Now you must weep over those who died in your place. Mourn your dead properly so you can live properly, Fleur. Weep yourself sick. And then from your heart, from under your skin, and from the arrogant shell you call the surface of your mind will come the pain of understanding your loneliness. This dress will force you to enter the darkness of your spirit. Your empty spirit. Your angry, lost, devouring, last soul. You will be left there, alone, and you will not know why you are alone. For you are a beggar in this life, Fleur Pillager. Four Souls. All the power you were given and all the luck that drove you to the Cities, all the cruelty that lay in your heart toward those who wronged you, all the devotion to the land and to your stubborn idea comes to nothing before one truth — your first child does not love you and your second child doesn’t know how. How can they love a woman who has wasted her souls? How can they love a mother who forgot to guard their tenderness, and her own? How can they love a woman who can suffer anything and do anything? Forget your power and your strength. Let the dress kill you. Let the dress save you. Let yourself break down and need your boy and your girl.”

Your name was Four Souls, I said, and my voice was neither gentle or kind, but neutral in its observation, cold as I listed Fleur’s names. Four Souls, but you haven’t got four souls anymore. Your name was Fleur because the French trader’s wife favored you. It is not Fleur. No more is it Fleur. No matter what people call you. Your name was Leaves Her Daughter. White Woman. Zhooniyaa. Your name was All Wrong. All Too Different. Impossible. Your name was Sorrow like the dog your aunt slaughtered so her child should eat. Your name was Kills Him Once. Kills Him Again. Kills Him Over and Over. I’m not faulting you for your revenge, but what did it get you? Are you satisfied when you look into the blank eyes of your son and when your daughter turns aside from you in the road? When she won’t call you Mother? When she spits on the ground to hear your name?

You are loved to extremes, and you are hated to extremes, Fleur Pillager. Now is the time for you to walk the middle way.

If you make it through the next eight days, I will give you my medicine dress. Not only that, I will give you the name that goes with it. For the dress has its own name, which it told to me while I was making it. When you are finally brave enough to experience fear, you will ask the dress for its name and plead for it to help you. If you ask humbly enough, the dress will tell you, and if you have the strength to accept that name, then the dress will give its name to your spirit. You and I and the dress will know who you are. Maybe we’ll tell my no-good husband Nanapush, too. Your name will live inside of you. Your name will help you heal. Your name will tell you how long to live and when to give up life. When the time comes for you to die, you will be called by that name and you will answer. For you have been lonely so long, you nameless one, you spirit, and it will comfort you to finally be recognized here upon this earth.

T HE BIRDS are gone, and with them, on their wings, the thunder and the lightning. The skin of ice grows farther out onto the lake and the wind turns the raindrops to dust. The dogs born on the reservation look like Shesheeb’s famous mutt now — all round-headed runts. I take credit for their ugliness. I am at peace. My tracks drag. This is old age, at last. My eyes are weary. My heart is full. My favorite parts of me limp and undemanding. Finally, I can see the shape of all that’s happened and all that is to come. Within me there has always burned an urge to see how things turn out. To know the story.

Now that I know the story, I can rest.

The woman once called Fleur Pillager, and now named Four Souls as well as another name nobody speaks, is now understood by the spirits. Like the spirits, she lives quiet in the woods. No road leads to her place. Hardly even a path. She doesn’t drown men anymore or steal their tongues, she doesn’t gamble. She doesn’t rub her hands with powders of human bones. She doesn’t sing, at least we can’t hear her above the rustle of dollar bills flying from our hands to the government and papers and more legal forms flapping down to cover us in return. Change is chaos and pain. There was no order in our making. This reservation came about in a time of desperation and upon it we will see things occur more desperate yet. When I look at the scope and the drift of our history, I see that we have come out of it with something, at least. This scrap of earth. This ishkonigan. This leftover. We’ve got this and as long as we can hold on to it we will be some sort of people.

Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply on the earth. We build roads. The ruts and skids of our wheels bite deep and the bush recedes. We make foundations for our buildings and sink wells beside our houses. Our shoes are hard and where we go it is easy to follow. I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words. But even as I write them down I know they are merely footsteps in snow. They will be gone by spring. New growth will cover them, and me. That green in turn will blacken, snow will obscure us all, but, my sons and daughters, sorrow is a useless thing. Much as the grass dies, the wind exhausts its strength, the tree topples in a light breeze, the dead buffalo melt away into the prairie ground or are plowed into newly scratched-out fields, all things familiar dissolve into strangeness. Even our bones nourish change, and even a people who lived so close to the bone and were saved for thousands of generations by a practical philosophy, even such people as we, the Anishinaabeg, can sometimes die, or change, or change and become.

LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of ten novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.