Four Souls (10 page)

I would ruin him before he harmed her. I would wreck him with my power. Already, he was probably sick and reeling from the dreams he’d suffered. He hadn’t a hope once I started on him in earnest with my medicine. Now, before Margaret put on her old gray wool blanket coat, I took from my sack of powders and teas a packet that held the gall of a mink. A pinch of that mixed with ground mica, so his eye would be dazzled. The ashes of two dogs killed in copulation. I dusted the back of Margaret’s coat, as she walked out, with the deadly attractant. I hoped that when he made a false move, and she lambasted him, she’d not only leave a mark but he would leave something with her. I needed a swatch of hair, a button, a few threads of his clothing, something he wore close to his body, in order to best him.

Now I have hardly ever had to fiddle with dark medicine, and I didn’t feel that good about using Margaret. But an old man who has survived this long does so at some risk to his principles. I couldn’t afford to stack myself above the problem when the stakes were the woman I loved.

I sat on my bench just outside the cabin door where I could see the crossroads and while she was gone I anxiously watched the world pass by. There went George Bizhiew with his blood palomino. There went Short Little Sweetheart. There went Mrs. Cardinal. I waited. I tried to let my mind travel after Margaret, but I think she knew it. She blocked my vision. Hung a curtain down across my sight. For I was left in a dark frustration until at last I saw the black curve of her bonnet as she returned through the scrub oak and alder that grew across the road.

She wasn’t steaming forward in a heat of indignation. She wasn’t in a cold and offended dudgeon. She wasn’t in a fury of motion and she didn’t poke at me with her stick or make a single sharp comment as she passed by me and into the house. I heard the scrape of pots, her careful arrangements as she prepared to cook. I stood behind her, examining her back for signs of Shesheeb. But there was nothing. Not one hair. Had he made a move on her? Had the bait worked? I couldn’t tell, and finally gave up. She served me food. I tasted cautiously. I tasted with careful thought. And what I tasted was not the careless and bitter old porridge she’d serve to me when angry, nor was it the succulent tidbit she’d save in the lean-to for those rare times I fell into her favor.

That afternoon, Margaret cooked me a decent stew composed of a rabbit she had snared and skinned just that morning. She boiled it with an onion, a few potatoes, a can of Red Jacket Beans, and a little bacon and pepper just for seasoning. I ate the first bite with curiosity, the next with gratitude, and joy, but every spoonful after that with increasing suspicion.

This was all too much the stew of a dutiful wife, which Margaret was not. The rabbit indicated humble industry on her behalf, planning, forethought. She must have set her snare last night and risen very early to check it. For days before that, even, she must have followed and noted the trails of rabbits. The can of beans had been waiting on our shelf for an occasion. And the onion. Where had she hidden such a thing? Had she perhaps brought it home from Mass in the cup of her bonnet? Was it a prize acquired from the nuns? Or was it, and here a bleak pang of outrage choked me, could this onion be a little love gift, an offering, a sly come-hither threat from Shesheeb?

I put my spoon down. My blood was thickening in my veins. My voice went ragged with fearful speculation. I should have kept my mouth shut, but couldn’t help myself.

“There is dirt in this stew,” I said to Margaret.

She shook her head as though she couldn’t have heard right, and then gave me a sour but still friendly look, as though my little joke had missed its mark. That was when I should have stopped. But then I tasted the potatoes. They were soft on my tongue, silken with gravy. I couldn’t remember where we kept the potatoes, whether we had potatoes, if potatoes had ever been inside our house, or within my reach, or if they ever existed anywhere on earth.

“Rotten to begin with!” My voice came out a shriek. Jealousy, that spider, sank its fangs in my heart. I jumped up and began accusing Margaret of small things and, when she laughed in contempt, of large and then outrageous things I knew were far beneath her. “And if you think that this stew will quench my fire,” I finished, “you are mistaken. I will definitely kill that greasy duck.”

Margaret calmly rose, took the stew outside, and dumped it. “For the dogs,” she said. “They deserve it more than you.”

I sat down, my face to the wall, trying to contain myself. I hadn’t thought that she would dump the stew, which was, after all, delicious. We so rarely had anything good to eat that her action shocked me back into my senses, as it was meant to. Only by exercising the utmost restraint did I keep myself from rushing outside with my spoon, beating off the dogs, scooping what was left into my mouth before it soaked into the earth. It took more effort yet to keep from expressing my regrets about my hasty words. To apologize to Margaret was to give her a sharper knife to cut me with, and since the whole thrust of my life was to dull her blade, I shut my mouth.

L
OVE POWDERS
sometimes double back and land upon their maker, which is why an expert is always required in their use. I learned what I know from the greatest of them all, Mirage, who peopled a tribe. The next day, I worked hard on a love medicine, smoked and thought over the ingredients. I had decided to put together the most potent batch I’d ever concocted, and use it. I’d lost all pride and only wanted a secure hold on my love, my Margaret, but something worked against me. Something or some person.

There was a pack of dogs that roamed the reservation, sometimes vicious, sometimes craven, and always starving. One of them was Shesheeb’s dog—the skinniest and saddest of them all. The dogs had gulped the stew. Of course, finding such good pickings, they came the next day for more and hung around watching with careful eyes. I sat on the bench beside the door, my ingredients beside me. As I worked on the medicine, they drew near. I suppose that my grinding up roots and burning off the ends of hairs and wetting and singeing leaves got their juices flowing, quickened their responses, made them pant. I turned away from my work, once, went inside the house to fetch something. When I came back outside again I saw that the leanest, saddest, runtiest-looking little gray dog of them all had leaped onto the stump just before the bench where I’d put the tray of finished medicine. That dog, Shesheeb’s dog, was licking up the powder.

“Awus!” I yelled and chased him off, but he’d been too quick for me. The stuff was gone. The dog had just eaten a batch of love powder stronger than any other I had ever made, and although the loss was hard I couldn’t help wishing that I could tell what just happened to Margaret. She would laugh. The poorest, weakest-looking, scroungiest, ball-headed mutt of them all had had the quickness and cleverness to make his move! I wondered for a moment what would come of it, but soon forgot. I had my own pressing troubles. Margaret. I wanted Margaret. I wanted to make her eye spark. To make her turn toward me like a plant toward sun, a child to the drum. She would be mine, I decided, and started all over with the preparations for the medicine. No dog would get it this time. But I couldn’t rely on medicine alone. I had to make up for the insult I’d delivered with my suspicions about the reasons for that stew. And I tried, but I think I was too close. Or perhaps I was trembling with an old man’s desperation. She was my last love, and the most challenging of all my life.

We were meant to face death together, Margaret and I, for what else is love in old age? On those occasions when our animosity melted and turned golden, I brimmed with such comfort that death lost a portion of its wretched power. I am an elder. Supposedly wise. Supposedly I am resigned to, familiar with, prepared for the end of my life. But the more I know of death, the more I fight death. I am at war, angry at death’s greed for the living. In fact, I’ve vowed to elude death as long as possible, to spite and despise death, along with Margaret. We are alike—tough, slippery, shrewd, unrepentant—though of course she showed a different face to the priest.

Perhaps my hand slipped as I ground up my powder, or my mind was distracted, and I got my proportions disarranged. For even as I was working a new medicine beneath the blade of a knife, and smoking off the ingredients with sage, I felt myself losing control. I felt the rage taking over, the poison, the sorrow over what Shesheeb had done to my sister long ago and what he was intent on doing now. A red fury seized me, heating up the marrow of my bones. I transferred the powder from the table to a twist of cloth. I had never before needed medicine to snag my women. They came to me! This humiliation was his fault, as was the anguish of my sister’s death.

I put down the powder, then stashed it away.

I’d had enough of him, too much for a lifetime, I decided. Before I was forced into the shame of putting a succession of love powders on my old lady, I would go out, hunting duck. I would find Shesheeb and kill him.

Only what method should I use?

I ticked off the most effective as I walked the wood. Poisoning was good, but I’d have to gain his trust, get near him, and that I didn’t think I could stomach. I wasn’t much good with knives— my arms had lost their strength and my grip was weak. I could shoot him, but killing with a gun wasn’t very manly and besides, it was a fast and undeservedly merciful death. I went through them all and wasn’t satisfied with any one of them until I chanced to remember that I had once snared a man—Clarence Morrissey. That snare had been effective, satisfying, cheap. True, I had let the dog live, but I would have no such pity on Shesheeb.

That day, my walk took me into the trading store to buy a good long length of wire for a snare. I put the wire on credit, which both Margaret and I paid up as rarely as possible, in the hope that if we did have to die we would go with a whopping bill. I looped the wire and carried it in my shirt. On the way home, I investigated all the paths I thought Shesheeb might walk, crept close enough to his place, his den, his lair of shame so I could smell the burnt grease of his cooking. It took some time.

I didn’t set my snare the first day, I didn’t set it the second day either. I waited and I thought, crept back to look for tracks and ascertain his habits. I knew that I’d have only one chance. The drop beneath the snare I had used on the Morrissey was made in winter, much easier to dig out from beneath. Much easier to hide. This would be difficult. I finally settled on a slim trail near his house, a straight bit with a bend just beyond. A natural place to look up, and pause, just in case a bear or who knows what might be coming around the corner. And after looking to step ahead freely. To brush through a fringe of leaves. In those leaves, the narrowest part, I would set the wire loop. But first I dug a shallow pan into the ground—here Shesheeb’s toes would dance, touch earth with a tantalizing desperation, twitch, die. My heart flinches in me now that I think of the strict care I took. How I made sure the noose slipped easily, shut lethally, squeezed, cut. How I calculated and removed all that his hands might clutch and made the hole extra wide and deeper than necessary. It was just a good thing I calculated heavy—for his potbelly and his fat head and his duck feet. Fortunate a wind dropped a light branch across my deadfall trap. Oh yes, very lucky!

F
OR THREE DAYS
, nothing. The sky was bleak and gray. I kept a strict watch and checked often. But maybe Shesheeb’s old bones ached and he’d stayed in the house. Maybe he was making some underhanded medicine of his own, maybe he was just smart. On day four a wind stirred and blew the clouds off. Through the scraps of white the sky blazed out, welcome and blue. I sat down on the little bench I had placed beside the cabin door and let the sun hit me. The warmth baked my old bones. I smelled the calm freshness of the rain drying off the leaves. I let myself dream, as I do so often now, of the old days and old people. The women gambling beside the lake. The summer gatherings when we picked berries and made our babies. The winter fires and the aadizokaanag, the stories that branched off and looped back and continued in a narrative made to imitate the flowers on a vine. I thought of tracks, joyous, dense, when we camped along the river, and how our tracks were now scattered and few. I relaxed against the sun-soaked wood of the cabin’s southern wall. I lived in my thoughts. I remembered my sister’s gentle and indulgent laugh—she was never harsh—and I felt the light touch of her fingers on my hair. A sound penetrated my fog of memory, a high-pitched and prolonged squeak not unlike the death yell of a rabbit.

I jumped up, made my way into the woods. The sound wasn’t human, but I didn’t expect Shesheeb to die with dignity. Indeed, I’d made as certain as I could that he’d die in shame. As I ran through the woods, or at least hobbled fast as my old bones would take me, the squeal increased its penetrating intensity. The pitch grew higher, wilder, shaking me to the core, even though I’ve hunted all my life, and fought, and seen men die in difficult ways. It was not a man, however, whose death rang through the leaves. Rounding the corner, I looked and skidded to a halt in wild shock, for it was Margaret I’d snared.

She strained on perfect tiptoe, like a zhaaginaash ballerina dancer, on the flimsy branch that had fallen across the shallow square that I had carved in the path. Her hands were up around her neck attempting to release the tightening wire. Her face was dark red. When she saw me she went silent. For the first time, ever, I had her complete attention. Even in my horror I was somehow gratified, and of course I was on fire to save her. She looked at me with such appeal and in such a state of frantic desperation that I would have done anything, changed places with her if I could. I threw myself down, and crept forward. Terrified to lose her balance, she froze. I edged closer until I was crouched nearly underneath her. She understood my plan and stepped onto my back. Though it might break me, I intended to rise. I marshaled every bit of my strength and lifted her enough so the wire loosened and she was able to pull it over her head. Once she was free, she fell, retching and gasping, beside me in the ditch.