Four Souls (7 page)

T
HE CHILD
was born screaming and would not be soothed until I thought to dip my finger into the whiskey cup and lay it on his kitten’s tongue. Afterward, we painted Fleur’s nipples with it so that the child would suck, although, by then, as she continued her medicinal drinking, I suppose he imbibed plenty at the breast. For the first week, I slept in the cellar, in Fleur’s old bed, and raced up the stairs when hearing the faintest cries. The next week, I slept on a pallet on the floor of the nursery. Soon I had the closet. Then my old room back. Nursemaid, doctor, fictional aunt, slave to the tiny one, servant to the mother too, I was in my correct element. I did all I could for Fleur, supplied the antidote for any worry, the remedy for any need, subdued any craving. I was so thoroughly immersed in my role, and in the charming new life, that only later, a good three months along, did I begin to have an inkling of what was starting to happen.

Fleur’s dullness and depletion, her sunk eye, yellowed skin, had begun to give me concern. I was slightly reassured when she rallied. She took charge of herself, rose from bed, began to walk and take air. But although I could see how her strength quickly improved, I also noticed that she had acquired a taste for the stuff that had arrested her labor. She would not be without a decanter of whiskey in any room, and she sipped it throughout the day. Though I never saw her visibly intoxicated, though she never slurred her talk or stumbled, it was clear that she had began to rely on the liquor and was lost without its golden fire.

T
HESE WERE
the happiest and the most requited times of my existence. The baby soft as butter, the blue-eyed little prince, was astonishingly like his father in coloration, and he was placid, either sweet or indifferent of temper. He started out thin and puling, but soon grew rolls and puckers, anklets and bracelets of silken fat. My continual presence at the house was accepted as long as I did not outstay my welcome, into the evening, but retired by the time John James Mauser returned for dinner. Still, I think that Mauser was amused at my enthusiasm for the boy, and perhaps sympathetic to my fervor, as it resembled his own. I found that I could sit in one place and simply stare at the baby without suffering one second of boredom or impatience. I’d never had the experience of this awed foolishness, this trance. I seemed quite brainless. I heard myself give out coos, hoots, burbles— noises I had never before uttered, animallike and almost desperate. Sometimes I gazed so long into the baby’s face that I forgot my own face. Or I touched the shining hands and forgot my own borders, melted skin through skin. As I made my way home each night, I had to remind myself that he was birthed of Fleur, belonged to Mauser, that I was nothing and no relation. Yet I had given away my own heart, and once that’s done there is no easy way to take it back.

Nanapush

T
HE COUGHBALL
of an owl is a packed lump of everything the bird can’t digest—bones, fur, teeth, claws, and nails. An owl tears apart its catch, gulps it down whole, and nourishes itself on blood and flesh. The residue, the undissolvable, fuses. In the small, light, solid pellet, the frail skull of a finch, femur of a mouse, cleft necklace of vertebrae, seed-fine teeth, gray gopher and rabbit fur. A perfect compression of being. What is the essence, the soul? my Jesuit teachers used to ask of their students. What is the irreducible? I answer, what the owl pukes. That is also the story—what is left after the events in all their juices and chaos are reduced to the essence. The story— all that time does not digest.

Fleur left the reservation. Of all that happened day to day, all the ins and outs of her existence, we have what came of the accumulation. We have the story.

The coughball itself is also a valuable find. Bad omen, but good medicine. It cures headaches, too much monthly blood, fevers, flux, sore feet, love. Fleur never used it, she never needed any medicine to snag her men. They fell her way like notched trees. She treated them that way, too, and burned them with her heat or used them for her purpose. Which is how, the second time Fleur Pillager went off the reservation, she toppled Minneapolis society and made a son. But her power got to be too much for her. She got careless. Too bold. She should have known that it is wrong to bear a child for any reason but to surrender your body to life.

Fleur was what you might call stingy with her spirit gifts, and so she didn’t get much back from other humans. Revenge, she wanted that. And also restoration. Don’t forget. She wanted her land back and if she couldn’t have the trees she wanted some equivalent justice for their loss. She was so concentrated on her plan that she could not receive. Not much love, is what I’m saying. She wasn’t loved. Eyah! Of course there was Eli, but there I rest my case. Yes, she was
passioned
. Men made brainless fools out of themselves in pursuit. They adored her and feared her in equal measure, as Eli did, and as Mauser did now.

We are all imperfect in our love for one another. That is why we turn to that kind spirit who created us. Gizhe Manito tries to protect us but sometimes fails, like any parent. Yet this spirit does not stop loving us. That is the one to whom Fleur turned, I am sure of it, to argue against like a parent when everything was taken. Everything, of course, except her young daughter, Lulu.

No, she did not give her first child away. It was not as they insist. Fleur merely took the girl off to hide her the way a wolf hides a pup when she must do battle to protect her standing or confront a danger. That’s how it was. Lulu was to be hidden in the government school, safe. Not left, not forgotten. This is what she did.

S
HE HAD COME
to kill and humiliate and take back her land, which he had stolen so carelessly that he wasn’t aware of it, but then Mauser made himself her dog anyway and wanted her in such an absence of self that she put aside her knife. Whatever tenderness Fleur owned at the time was attached to her child. What love she felt was buried underneath a tree marked by a red flag. Her love was bones, or bound up in loss. No man had truly felt it. So when Mauser bared his heart and throat he knew, perhaps, the wolf in her couldn’t kill him on instinct and the woman in her could not destroy him out of sheer intrigue.

He would have broken into a drenching, clear sweat, but ever since Fleur had returned his body to him, he had exercised increasing control over all of its jerks and spasms and eccentric twitches. She had healed him in order to wreck him in good condition, which to her was the only honorable way a Pillager could take satisfaction in vengeance. But healing a man is dangerous. I was going to say
a man like Mauser
. But perhaps it is dangerous for a woman to heal any man at all.

He desired her and she grew accustomed to her power. Maybe she desired him, though she would never admit it to me. Some women like a smart man, and others prefer a fool. Speaking as both, I can tell you it doesn’t matter if you can convince a woman you have something to hide.

So perhaps that was how John James Mauser did it. He threw out a net of questions, uncertainties, riddles, and Fleur dove into it, curious as an otter. She was snagged. She would be dragged along the bottom. She would be weakened and changed. His desire would exhaust her, and the high life temporarily fascinate her with its rich swirl of hilarious chimookomaanag doings and foods. She would be dazzled more than anything by the mounds of smoked white sturgeon at the party given in her honor at their wedding. For many years afterward, she talked of it. Platters of that most exquisite fish, dishes large as wagon wheels, piled high.

Uncle
, she’d say,
I wish I could eat it all again!

She withheld herself physically from Mauser until he came up with the papers and then went through with the wedding. By zhaaginaash law, she understood that his legal wife would inherit all he owned. Once she figured out how to kill him, she’d have her land back. But she could not kill him with a knife, this time— she would have to use much more subtle means, undetectable means, if that were possible. The problem was, the closer she got to the man she’d come to destroy, the muddier grew her intentions. She kept putting off his death. He took her traveling, brought her to theaters and great halls where she heard a new and violently beautiful music. They went to places where a thousand pictures were stored on the walls. He fed her the flesh of animals she’d never tasted. The meat of fruits she’d never seen. He seemed to get a hold over her in bed, too—perhaps some chimookomaan form of manaa that wrecked her resolve, at least for a short time after their marriage. That was probably when she was not careful enough with her counting of the days between moons. Anishinaabeg women had known, well before the Catholics preached it, a method of strict accounting by moon to regulate the even and timely appearance of their children. She never said it, but I believe that Mauser overwhelmed Fleur’s feminine defenses, perhaps with liquor. I don’t know when she first touched it, but it stands to reason that the taste of whiskey could have messed up her system of counting. For I don’t believe Fleur ever meant to have a child with Mauser.

Once she carried the child, Fleur was caught and she knew it, for although she was enduring, strong, bold, and remarkable, she had a weakness. She had survived the sicknesses that destroyed the rest of the Pillagers, but she was affected by the ravage of those fevers. I only know what I’ve heard from listening in on the women, from things Margaret has revealed to me of women’s private business. But from eavesdropping on them I understand that bearing children was dangerous for Fleur. In order not to let the child out too soon, Fleur had to stay still, keep to her bed. And that was where the whiskey got hold of her. As it has with so many of us, even myself, the liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts.

I
N THE YEARS
after Fleur left, I had fallen into a state of keen and busy sorrow. I diverted myself with politics, stood for the tribal chairman, and immersed myself in a snow of white paper. I had argued about existence and the intentions of the whiteman’s God on earth with the Jesuits and then with Father Damien, but I had never come to grips with the worst scourge ever loaded on us. Smallpox ravaged us quick, tuberculosis killed us slow, liquor made us stupid, religion meddled with our souls, but the bureaucrats did the worst and finally bored us to death. I soon found that the stacks of rules and regulations that I had to understand in order to run the tribe pinched my brain and made me even touchier than Margaret.

Along with rules, there came another affliction. Acquisition, the priest called it. Greed. There was no word in our language to describe this urge to own things we didn’t need. Where before we always had a reason for each object we kept, now the sole reason was
wanting
it. People traded away their land for pianos they couldn’t play and bought clothing too fancy for their own everyday use. They bought spoons made of silver when there wasn’t food, and gilded picture frames when they had neither pictures nor walls. A strange frenzy for zhaaginaash stuff came over the best of us. Where before we gave our things away and were admired for our generosity, now we grew stingy and admired ourselves for what we grabbed and held. Even Margaret, whose eyes were sharp for foolishness, was overcome.

It was the nuns who changed Margaret, those women with the poor mouth souls. Ever since Margaret had visited the nuns’ residence, she had wanted a floor covering like theirs. The substance they walked on was both soft and hard, she told me, and could be mopped shiny clean. It was far more beautiful than stone, earth, or wood; it was more green than leaves, with drops of cream and ink curled through it. “As though a child were playing in paint with a matchstick,” she said. I nodded. I knew all about paint, for Margaret had bought paint one day and done something very beautiful and strange.

We had cleared a path to the cabin and then widened it enough to accommodate a wagon. I thought it was fine as it was, but Margaret wanted to improve this path. Somewhere, she got an idea to use the asiniig, our grandfathers, stones I had gathered in a heap near my sweat lodge just out back of the cabin. One by one, she lugged them out and placed them on either side of the road, leaving a tiny pinch of tobacco next to each one as an apology—or a request, for she had further plans. Early the next day she left for town and came back with the paint. Pink paint. With careful strokes of a brush that she made herself, from a squirrel’s tail, she painted every one of those rocks leading up to our place. Pink was the color. A bright candy pink.

“Onizhishin,” I said. For sure, they looked marvelous, so bright in the green scruff and dead leaves. “You’ve dressed up our ancestors.”

“It was nothing.” Margaret was modest, but I suppose my admiration for her work had some effect, for she began to improve the rest of our dwelling.

“If we have to stay in one place,” she reasoned, “if we can’t move around anymore and follow the rice and maple sugar and meat, then I plan to live in a good way. First, we have to make a better outhouse, just like Father Damien has drawn for us, and then… well, I’ve got an idea.”

No more sitting in the sun, dreaming and smoking my pipe. Now, if I wanted Margaret to cook for me or even to give me a kind word now and then, I was forced to work. I dug a hole for trash, burned it, and scattered the ashes. I chopped and even stacked fire-wood. I swept clean the ground leading up to our door. Inside our cabin, we had already packed the earth down hard and laid skins over it. I took out the skins each morning and shook them clean. Instead of walking right inside we took our makizinan off at our door. We sat on the skins and blankets, or the spindly wooden chair Margaret had traded for an old buffalo hide. She had me tack up a shelf on one side of the room. There was enough pink paint to brighten the boards. The centerpiece of our cabin was a stove with a pipe running into the wall. The stove was black iron, fancy, with a small nickel grill and a cooking box. We even nailed together a small table. It now looked to me like we had a comfortable and even fancy place, and I said so, but Margaret couldn’t get the nuns’ floor out of her mind. She kept pining over it, stabbing her finger at the skins on our dirt floor and frowning. She kept thinking of ways to get that substance—linoleum.

I hoped that, as with many of her enthusiasms, she’d get over it. She’d once had a frenzy for making maple sugar candy in carved wooden molds. She’d gotten past that. And then there was the time she planted a garden, not with the old varieties of squash and corn, but new and outlandish seeds that produced round globes of bitter melons that blackened at the first frost, hard yellow roots to cook and mash, and tart, ripe, red love apples that stung the mouth. I thought linoleum would fade just as these other fancies had, but then I noticed that Margaret had grown distant. Her gaze had a faraway quality, as if she were peering into the future. She figured and she plotted. She found a salesman and purchased small linoleum pieces that she laid on the ground and looked at for hours, as though she could grow them across the floor by the intensity of her stare. But the bits glowed against the earth or clean skins and did nothing.

“They are dead. They never had any life,” I told her. “Forget them and nestle in my arms.”

Margaret waved a hand to shut me up and took out her little pipe and tobacco pouch. She loaded it, puffed away as if her brain were on fire and her thoughts were the smoke, rising in thick circles. Her eyes narrowed and she glared in a fixed black way at nothing. From time to time she gestured and nodded and smiled to some invisible person. I should have worried about her right then, but instead I grew annoyed.

“The earth is much better than the linoleum you crave, and so are the skins beneath our feet. Leave off thinking of the nuns’ floor or you will sicken yourself, and me!”

But she did not, the smooth stuff gripped her. It drove her to distraction and the urge to finally acquire it ended up fracturing her will.

W
E WERE
snared in laws by then. Pitfalls and loopholes. Attempting to keep what was left of our land was like walking through a landscape of webs. With a flare of ink down in the capital city, rights were taken and given. Finding an answer from a local official was more difficult than tracking a single buffalo through the mazed tracks of creatures around a drinking hole. We acquired an Allotment Agent to make it easier for us to sell our land to white people. Then we got a Farmer in Charge to help us chop our trees down, our shelter, and cut the earth up, our mother. Land dwindled until there wasn’t enough to call a hunting territory. That was because we were supposed to learn to farm in the chimookomaan way, using toothed machines and clumsy, big horses to pull them. We were all going to have to plant seeds the way Margaret did, for the rest of our lives, and yet we’d only just grown used to the idea that we owned land—something that could not possibly belong to any human.