Four Souls: A Novel

by Louise Erdrich

  Placide, of course, could not. Her modesty was a barrier. She tried her best to convey the spirit of the practice without resorting to crude word-pictures.

  “We exercise the mutual power of our wills,” said Placide. “And the power of the heart.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To collect and act on loving thoughts.”

  There was a pause.

  “That is all very well,” said the doctor. “But insofar as marital congress is concerned…”

  “We have always practiced a conscious conservation of creative energy.” Placide was earnest. “It has had the most exciting effect on my artistic output!”

  “I see.” The doctor seemed to be taking notes. “Is procreation possible through the marital relationship?”

  “It is not wished,” said Placide with quiet assurance.

  “Well then,” the doctor tried again, “is the congress satisfactory?”

  “We have attained a marvelous level of mutual reciprocity,” said Placide. “And now, if I may excuse myself.”

  “Not just yet.”

  I could tell the doctor was not only losing patience but running out of circumlocutions.

  “I must inquire, Mrs. Mauser, does the practice of Karezza require the partakees to suppress emission?”

  “Yes,” said Placide, rather strongly, “there is no crisis!”

  “No propagative crisis,” said the doctor, making certain.

  Placide must have nodded or made some sign, for she gave no verbal answer.

  “Then my diagnosis is confirmed.” The doctor’s tone was rather grim. “The frustration of your husband’s natural discharge has resulted, I must say, in the most bitter penalty. Sit down, Mrs. Mauser. You will hear me!”

  I heard the chair creak.

  “In the beginning,” said the doctor, “your husband’s dulled eye, his sallow countenance, drawn features, and pained air of melancholy, as well as his insistence on social isolation, caused me to suspect that he suffered from one of the secret diseases.”

  I gasped, rather loudly, and Placide said nervously, “What was that?”

  “A secret disease,” repeated Dr. Fulmer, mistaking her suspicion for ignorance. “If I must be completely direct, so be it. I suspected the masked pestilence!”

  But Placide must have still affected that blank sweetness one finds so frustrating.

  “Gonorrhea!” he practically yelled. My glass shook and I believe I flushed to the roots of my hair. The doctor forged on. “His previous doctor must have suspected the same. For that reason, the patient was prescribed a diet absent of ales or malt liquors, coffee, salt meats, intense seasoning, and asparagus.”

  “He was given no asparagus,” said Placide, meek now.

  “For Chordee, which he suffered at night, he was of course advised to place his posterior against a cold wall.”

  “He did that,” said Placide, “as far as I know.”

  “His manservant also assisted in his nightly treatments.”

  Placide must again have looked stupefied.

  “Prolonged immersion of the”—here Dr. Fulmer struggled, but used the words—“male sexual member in hot water. I believe it was of some benefit. But when your husband did not respond to my colleague’s satisfaction, he was prescribed urethral injections of sulfate of zinc. Mrs. Mauser, those treatments had little or no effect. For that reason, I conducted today’s frank interview, which enlightened me to the extent that I have changed the diagnosis. Mrs. Mauser…” The doctor paused dramatically. “Your husband suffers from a locomotor ataxia and melancholic neuralgia complicated by a rare male chlorosis, all brought on by a damming of the sperm!”

  “Oh!” Placide sounded quite shocked.

  “Where do you think it goes?” asked Dr. Fulmer, rather savagely. I pictured him leaning forward, into Placide’s face, and tapping his head, “To the brain! To the brain!”

  “I’ve heard enough.” Placide threw herself toward the door. Her heels skittered on the polished parquet. I quickly set my glass on the table and retreated to a chair, opened some book and pretended for some time to read, at first because I feared one of the two might enter and find me. But their steps retreated down the hall. As I mulled over what I had learned, I remained fixed in place with my eyes locked on the open pages of a book that made no sense, with a title I can’t remember. I couldn’t help it. Other pictures, other words made me splutter like a child. A laugh kept bursting out of me. I was helpless to hold it back. His posterior against a cold wall! No sooner did I succeed in pushing one picture from my thoughts than I imagined Fantan drawing that basin of hot water. I tried with all my might not to think of the immersion of the male part, but my defense failed. Another laugh assaulted me. I am ashamed to say it was at least half an hour before I could compose my features and calm my nerves sufficiently to leave.

  THE LEECHES arrived the next day, an experimental procedure. Dr. Fulmer, his tiny mustache all aquiver, applied them directly to brother-in-law’s temples, where they would draw off an excess of fluid produced by the seminal overflow. Although I brought towels and attempted in my way to assist, I was soon barred from brother-in-law’s room and had to content myself by directing the preparation of invalid foods. I decided on chicken cream, lemon jelly, and peptonized beef tea. The last I prepared myself. I shredded the beef and set it in a saucepan of cold, salted water. I was heating the mixture gently, stirring out the juice, when Fleur came into the kitchen. Either she didn’t see me, or she acted entirely for my benefit.

  “Hot water,” she ordered Mrs. Testor, setting down a basin next to the stove.

  “Hot water yourself,” said Mrs. Testor, who was not to be ordered about by the likes of Fleur.

  “Hot water!” I exclaimed, shocked that such a mission be entrusted to Fleur. “I hardly think that for you to bring the hot water is appropriate.” I shooed her off. For such an intimate procedure, I reasoned as I rushed up with the basin, better that a family member be in attendance.

  “Thank you.” Dr. Fulmer accepted the basin at the door to brother-in-law’s room. I followed him in.

  “I need assistance,” said Dr. Fulmer over his shoulder. “Will you kindly hold the basin, Miss Gheen? The patient is suffering acute neuralgic spasms characterized by twitching of the extremities. The force of his movements could very well tip the basin. Take the utmost precautions.”

  I did so. Brother-in-law was sitting on the bed, quite limp, supported by Fantan. The leeches were blackly clustered at his temples and he was taking shallow breaths. His eyes were shut.

  “Now put the basin on the floor directly before the patient and kneel there with your hands on the rim, Miss Gheen. Steady!”

  Although I felt some trepidation regarding the procedure at this point, I took a deep breath and fiercely counseled myself to show but the most refined sense of disinterested compassion. I knew, of course, the location of the afflicted part. Yet I had not ever actually seen one. I couldn’t think how the doctor intended to immerse the necessary member while brother-in-law was in a seated position, but I knelt on the floor anyway. Fantan laid brother-in-law against some pillows, crouched beside me, removed John James Mauser’s socks and slippers. He then placed brother-in-law’s feet carefully in the basin. At that point I rose and left the room. His feet! I have never liked other people’s feet. I must confess it. Even as a girl I would avert my eyes when Placide took off her shoes. I made my way downstairs to the kitchen, wondering just what Dr. Fulmer took me for—a servant? Spinster handmaiden? My beef tea had boiled to a jelly meanwhile, too dark and rich for a weak constitution.

  LATER, as I devoured the beef tea myself, I reflected. I realized that I missed being privy to brother-in-law’s treatments. For much of my life I was not acquainted with what may seem the obscure derivation of the adjective “sincere.” It is from two Latin words, sine, without, and cera, wax. What a rare thing it is to be treated without wax. My desire is always to conduct relationships based upon honest regard. A
s I sipped the last drops of beef tea I tried to enumerate moments stripped of pretense and all I could come up with was those efforts of mine, with brother-in-law, when he grasped my hand in desperate gratitude, unknowing, and allowed me to really see him. As I relived those moments of extremity, a strange thought met me unawares. Were I not to know him, or someone, some person, at this radical depth, I fear my time on earth would be hideous. I was surprised to think this. But it crossed my mind that to know others on a superficial level only is a desperate hell and life is worth living only if the veneer is stripped away, the polish, the wax, and we see the true grain of the other no matter how far less than perfect, even ugly, even savage at the heart.

  FIVE

  Under the Ground

  Nanapush

  ON 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.

  IN THE TIME before the time the last treaty came about, there was a great healing that took place in the camp of Under the Ground. It made us weep, it made us sorry, it made us wonder who we are. It made confusion between the dead and the living, this world and the other alongside our ordinary life. And yet, in spite of those conflicts, what happened that night gave slender hope on the reservation land that the old ones called ishkonigan, leftover, scraps so poor even the greediest would cast these bits aside.

  The mother of the girl who became the one we know as Four Souls was born upon the great red island, fourth daughter of a fourth daughter in a line of dawn woman healers going back across the miigis water and farther yet, back before the oldest remember. Everybody who met her face-to-face thought her a simple woman—small, short, and round with a capturing smile. Her eyes, they might be penetrating when they wanted to know your case, but otherwise they had no other symptom in them but kindness. Nevertheless, she had accomplished something few understood.

  As it happened, disease struck. Some left old sacred ground, struck out for the new, hearing some fresh powerful tale of the men in black robes who did not copulate. Besides cures, people needed supplies. Blankets. Knives. Who can blame them? Supposing the world went dead around you and all the animals were used up. The sky, too, of pigeons, doves, herons, and rain. Supposing one new sickness after another came and racked deep, so that young men and women threw themselves on stones to break their limbs in the crush of their fever. Suppose this happened in your own life, what then, would you not think of surrendering to the cross, of leading yourself into the hands of new medicines?