Louise Erdrich: Four Souls

O N THE NIGHT that Fleur decided it was time to kill James Mauser, she cleaned her knife on her hair and tested its edge. He was well enough, she thought, he valued his life sufficiently, to suffer as she took it away. She’d grown tired of the long wait, and wanted to go home. So she bundled together all that she owned, set it out by the back door, and slipped like a shadow up the service staircase and down the wide hall of the main entry. From there to the stairs that led up to the ballroom. Stairs that didn’t creak at all if you trod their edges. She glided down the upstairs hall to the door of his bedroom. The dark was a quiet blanket. Everyone was asleep. Turning the crystal doorknob with a stealthy hand, she entered Mauser’s bedroom and stood in the entryway, regarding him. A low lamp burned just beside the man, who slept lightly. A book was splayed open on his chest. Small professorial reading glasses perched half askew on the bridge of his nose. Fleur edged soundlessly close to the bed and, as he turned in his sleep, frowning, sensing her proximity, she nestled close to him as a snake to a warm rock. His frown changed to a dreamy smile. She gently coaxed his head to the pillow of her breast. He groaned happily in his dream and she put her knife to his throat. She woke him by breathing into his ear.

“I have come here to kill you.”

“What took you so long,” said Mauser. He was not asleep after all. He had been waiting without sleep for many nights on end. He had rehearsed what he would say to her so that he wouldn’t tremble, yet he could not control a slight quiver as her knife creased his throat.

“Do you know who I am?” said Fleur.

“Of course I do,” said Mauser.

“Who am I?”

“You’re a relative of one of the women I wronged.” His breath caught as Fleur’s knife cut a little deeper.

Her voice thickened with rage. “One of them? Awenen? I am the woman whose land you stole.”

Mauser was silent. He’d taken the land of so many it was impossible that he should remember just who they were. His mind was reeling back through titles and false transfers and quitclaim deeds. He thought he’d had her figured. Who could she be?

“Who are you?” he asked, then, very humbly.

Fleur answered in a sarcastic, angry voice. “I am the sound that the wind used to make in a thousand needles of pine. I am the quiet at the root. When I walk through your hallway I walk through myself. When I touch the walls of your house I touch my own face. You know me.”

“No, I don’t,” said Mauser, now thinking that she was crazy and supposing himself to be in even more danger than he had imagined.

“I’m going to slice you open,” said Fleur, all in Ojibwe, which she knew well he understood, “and take out your guts and hang them on the walls. Then I’m going back home to live on the land you took. If you send your spirit there to look for me, I’ll kill your spirit too.”

“I won’t send my spirit,” said Mauser, “it is meant to serve you.”

He was a hardened man, a much different sort of man than the one who presented himself to his wife’s family, and to society at large. Still, though he had entertained certain grotesqueries of fate with an unflinching, stoic enjoyment, he was at the moment afraid, on a level that surprised and then embarrassed him. He had the childish urge to wet the bed, and knew that if he did she would immediately slit his throat. Only with the most monumental effort did he keep from pissing. He counted his breaths to keep from thinking about the knife, but could not help imagining that with each one he might have breathed his last. The next, therefore, came as a gift. The air that filled his lungs was refreshingly sweet. A wave of euphoria gripped him at the beginning of each breath and one of terror at its end. His next breath might whistle through the slit in his throat, and that would be the last breath he’d hear. Yet as another and another breath came and went, he grew encouraged. Gradually, he felt the woman’s curiosity gain the upper hand.

“How?” she asked, unwillingly. “How is your spirit meant to serve me?”

Now the burden of responsibility for his own life lay with Mauser. If he answered well, he might survive, but if he gave a less than satisfactory destination for his spirit, it would pour fast from the extra smile underneath his chin. His brain raced, and then he spoke.

“My spirit is meant to be the slave of your spirit. I will make you my wife and give you everything I own. And more than that, I will love you no matter what you do to me, as a dog does. My spirit is meant to be g’dai, your animal, to do with as you wish, let live or kill.”

Once he’d said this, to his desperate surprise, he knew it was true. He couldn’t have known, however, exactly how true. Nor how painful would be the living out of his original apprehension. He only knew at that moment the fabulous relief as her hand lifted away from his throat. And then the shift of her body told him she was considering something else. He hadn’t a notion in the world that it would have been easier for him if she’d used her knife.

OF COURSE, as she was Four Souls, she probably knew all that would happen in some way unavailable to us. Pillagers don’t do anything without a reason, though it is sometimes hidden even to them. I don’t hold with everything people say about Fleur’s people, but I have seen what I’ve seen. When Fleur took the name Four Souls she thought she was taking a name that would build her up, protect her, and it was true, the original Four Souls was a powerful woman. What Fleur didn’t know was the name would take over and have more of an effect upon her than she could have conceived. For the name was something else — it was forceful, it was old, and it had its own intentions. In the end, it was even stronger than Fleur.

There are names that go on through the generations with calm persistence. Names that heal a person just for taking them, and names that destroy. Names that travel, names that bring you home, names you only mutter in the deep water of your sleep. Names that bring memory of painful attachments and names lost to time and the reckonings of chance. Names are throwaway treasures. Names hold the sweetness of youth, bring back faces and unsettling resemblances. Names acquire their own life and drag the person on their own path for their own reasons, which we can’t know. There are names that gutter out and die and then spring back, distinguished. Names that go on through time and trouble, names to hold on your tongue for luck. Names to fear. Such a name was Four Souls.

So the name was going to do what it wanted with Fleur Pillager. From the beginning, she did not own it. Once she took it, the name owned her. It would slam her to the earth and raise her up, it would divide her, it would make her an idiot and nearly kill her, and it would heal her once it had finished humbling her. Four Souls— the original Four Souls, I mean — had exactly what her name tells us, four souls that she could use. Four times she knew in her life that within the year she was meant to die, and so, those four times, she threw out a soul. That soul went about as a bird or animal, the shape of which only she knew. That soul roamed here and there, gaining knowledge of things, then came back and reported to its owner. So Four Souls grew wiser. But she knew too much already, perhaps, as those Pillagers do. For she was the daughter of a woman who became a healer when she was only a girl.

I’m going to lay down the roots here. I’m going to explain things. This is where the story fills in deeper, where you see through the past so you understand what made Fleur and the name she took too powerful to contain. This, I suspect, is the shadow Fleur dragged out behind her when she was born. This is the face she wore on her face. For she was born with a spirit face on her face and that face was laid away in the woods for the Gizhe Manito to love and to name. That face had a name but we don’t know it. We would never understand it. That face was named in the spirit language. Fleur got her name, her pretty French name, from a trapper’s wife, but of course she had the name that no one could speak. And when she took the Four Souls name, she brought down on herself not only the great strength, but the sorrow and the complexity of the woman who came before.