Four Souls

by Louise Erdrich

  Nothing is complete without its shadow. Shesheeb was the older half brother of Pauline Puyat, who’d left to pray herself into a lean old vulture. Perhaps Shesheeb came to take her place on the reservation—otherwise I suppose we would have been too light, too sun-filled, too trusting, and floated up without our anchors of dark.

  Ever since he was born and guns sounded across the lake, Shesheeb had been my special foe. My mother said that when I heard those guns crack I cried and went stiff with rage in her arms. Even when we were babies, I believe he lay waiting to singe me in his cradle board, his tikinaagan. Or to whip me with a lash made of deerhide strips off his mother’s tanning frame. For he did these things. While we were still small, he stood on the far edge of a slough in late fall, after a light dust of snow, and called me across the ice with a frantic wave and cry so that I bounded onto the thin crust, skidding with alarm, and went through. If he’d only laughed! But he just looked at me from the other side with sly, gloating wonder.

  He was given to his aunt, Iron Sky, to raise. She gave him the charcoal, the burnt stick, the ashes, which was a sign for him to fast and find his vision and his spirit helpers. One morning, he darkened his face and went off into the woods to ask for help, which never came. His aunt gave him the charcoal again, and then again. Nothing. Finally he snatched it from her grip with a glare and went out to fast until he grew so gaunt his nose stuck out and his eyes were big and staring in his head. Iron Sky would not give up—she knew already that the mind of her boy was a complex knot. Only for the manidoog to untangle, she said, or to cut. The last time she sent him out he was nearly dead once he returned. He staggered and dropped flat over on the path. It was on that trip that something happened to him we can’t say, we don’t know, we haven’t a name for and don’t want one. Listen.

  When he came back, he stared straight at everyone as if to capture or pierce. Only, if you looked back, as I dared to do, his eyes flickered away—flat, nerveless. He needed to get near people. He would not be alone, and glanced around in a constant, anxious way to see who noticed him or as though he was followed. What did he see? Form of the owl, flight soundless, a ruffled heart. Night-seeing and invisible. Balls of crackling light. A man paced swiftly with his head twisted backward on his neck. Two rabbits screamed from the same snare. Shesheeb discovered cruelty. He cut the tongue from a slow, harmless porcupine and watched it stand in surprise there at his feet, bleeding until it toppled. He laughed, and Iron Sky understood that to laugh at the pain of a harmless animal is the sign of a mind twisting in on itself. She sent him from her place soon after, with her thoughts shut carefully on what he had become.

  He took up wandering, from one house to another, always sent to the next place, until he came to us. My family took him in for a short time, to our sorrow. I remember the sap was running when he got his name. My father wore two earrings, and bending over the boiling sap one fell off into the kettle. He didn’t notice until the boy who was staying with us reached in to grab it. His hand plunged down. He let out a sly and greedy quack. The noise startled us. He made the sound again, looking at his boiled hand, the earring. Quack! And so Shesheeb was named for the black duck, greasy and sly.

  How he got my sister to marry him, I don’t know. For he grew up to look like a duck, fat and juicy, with a potbelly and a broad, flat nose, a shovel face, gleaming feathers for hair and a bowlegged hunch. His eyes used to be small and bright, though it was said that now he was almost blind. His laugh was doubtless the same sardonic quack he used when, much younger, he had struck his young wife with a burning stick. The blow marked the side of my sister’s lovely face with a knot of flesh that grew darker and darker, until it swallowed her. Then came the winter of our last starvation, when she disappeared. I know what happened. The truth is this: Shesheeb went windigo. That he killed and ate my sister was never proved in a whiteman’s court, so he went free. But the rest of us knew.

  Shesheeb married into the Lazarres. He dragged his second wife out onto the plains, into Bwaan country. So he was yet aligned with them, and now, he had come back to doctor them and to lead them in their opposition to all I stood for on the council, as the tribal chairman, and as myself.

  Ever since the first snow, he had settled down the road in a little gray house that used to belong to Iron Sky. How he put his hands on her tiny, handsome, tidily kept place I do not know. But from there, I could sense him. He was a splinter in my foot that pierced me when I stepped down hard. A darkness that rose just beyond the edges of the woods. I could feel him out there and I could smell his charred feathers. Crippled in one foot, he limped and duckwalked through the bush gathering black medicines. Lazarres came visiting him, but they avoided Kashpaw ground. And from his front door, from wherever he could, the old dog tried to steal my Margaret.

  Margaret’s churchgoing piety dictated that she always beat Father Damien to Mass, and her tendency to scold and worry always made her late in leaving me. Therefore, it was her habit to take shortcuts across the land of Shesheeb, to pass near his cabin. More than once, she had returned with a report that he’d tried to waylay her with clever talk. Maybe he needed someone to keep his old bones warm in his cold winter blankets. Or perhaps he had seen her once too often, noticed the bold secret of her look, felt the prickle of her provocative scorn.

  “You stay away from him today,” I warned her as she put warm wrappings on her legs and bundled on her heaviest coat.

  Margaret’s gaze sharpened and she smiled into her beaded drawstring bag, counting the coins she was so save-y with. Her hair had not grown back as thick after her braids were severed, and her strength was less because of it, but strands of inky black still shone even in the winter light, and Margaret still possessed the mental fever that acted on me like a love charm. She blew hot, then cold, chilled me, scorched my fingers on those rare times she welcomed my touch. Never hiding her thoughts, her words were playful as arrows.

  “Shesheeb?” Margaret made her voice falsely innocent. “He talks sweet to me when I pass by, I like the things he says.”

  I gripped the knob of my willow stick, thrust it hard at the swirling pattern of Margaret’s floor.

  “Don’t poke my linoleum!”

  “Your linoleum, your spanking new linoleum, that’s all I hear! What does the stringy old duck tell you?”

  “He says I have a round cheek,” she explained with some pride. “I have a young walk, my legs look plump, my thighs sweet and tender.”

  “He’s just hungry.” I dragged my stick in a deliberate scrape and banged it on the floor to anger her. “Besides, I’ve heard the old prick’s half blind.” She kicked my cane from my hands.

  “The only stiff thing you own!”

  Margaret puckered up her lips and left me, her walk swift and firm. Shesheeb was right about her cheek and legs and thighs, and I was wrong not to follow her that day. For maybe he got an answer, a glance from her eye that encouraged him, a pout from those lips he would probably call juicy, though toward me they were thin, set, and stern. Maybe that, or Shesheeb could have done some darker work. It could be that he hid a love packet in the snow of the path she walked—clippings of his hair and nails, the coughball of an owl, Margaret’s and his own hair twisted together. Stepping over it, perhaps Margaret felt a low warmth, a hot breath along her neck, a chinook wind flowing through her arms, her blood, an early spring. I could see it! Her thoughts melted and softened, too sudden. She raised her basket and sang an old French tune.

  The time she was gone to Mass lengthened and its passage seemed too slow. I tried singing. I tried chopping wood. I tried to distract myself by drumming and then by mudding the log sides of our cabin. But my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy. And then, when she finally returned with the smell of incense in her clothes, I watched her with close, testing eyes. I thought that she looked too cheerful—in her cheeks wild roses flushed. Winter chinook, for sure, I decided in an inner fury. He’
d used his love ways, his bad old powers on her, used his clever tonics and suggestions, or that black stare from under his eyebrows said to draw women to him like chaff to a knife.

  That night Margaret turned her back to me as we lay wrapped in our blankets. She knocked my hand off her breast, pressed her lips shut against my kiss. I couldn’t sleep, and so I was alert when in her dreams she mumbled something slow and soft that could have been his name. Shesheeb! Hearing that, I sprang up, away from her side, my throat choked with blazing poison. Again, I was young and hot-blooded, ready to grab and kill with my bare hands. Of course, he wasn’t in reach and in fact I wasn’t even sure I’d read Margaret’s sigh correctly with my fuzzy hearing. Still, in my doubt, I was unable to settle next to her in peace and so I went out the door. The night cold was deep, the icy wind dry and sharp. I breathed desperate, cold drafts, sucking in the air. At last, a calmer, puzzled spot cracked open deep in my heart, and I remembered my sister.

  IN THAT MONTH of the year when the snow is rotten and the deer starve, Shesheeb had come to court my sister. She was round as a prairie hen, with a surprised mouth, always laughing and curious. Her eyes were soft and wondering. Simple ways, she had her simple ways. Fifteen summers she had bobbed on the stalk of her family like a sweet blossom, unfolding her petals. Fifteen autumns had taught her sorrow and to work hard, to put away all she could save for the winter. Fifteen springs she had budded with tender inner life. But the year of Shesheeb would teach her more than I know, even now, when I have seen four seasons go around fifty times and more.

  I was only one year older, so she and I shared a mind. Children do that when they are left alone to dream up their games. I was half grown before I knew her feelings weren’t my feelings, her thoughts were not my thoughts, her laugh came out of her mouth alone and not mine. Still, the closeness lingered, so that when Shesheeb came calling, slouching in to sit near her on the ground, sliding his finger up her arm, darting his eyes down the side of her throat until her cheeks went hot, I understood her fascination. Hated, but understood. The mind of my sister was beautifully wound, a fine skein, a perfect spool. Shesheeb took hold of the end of the string and then, slowly, he unraveled her.

  I SHOOK my head to clear it of old sorrows. My thoughts came up out of my mind like the steam from a bear’s winter den. I tried to calm myself. Perhaps I gave Shesheeb too much credit for his powers. Perhaps he was not as clever as I feared. There was no sound in the woods and it was perfectly dark. Tonight, at least, the old man traveled in no ball of light. I heard no evil calls or whistles of medicine pitched out from his direction. It occurred to me that perhaps I should look at Shesheeb’s return in a different way. What if I began to view the old man from a position of strength? What if I had drawn him back to me in order to take vengeance? What if I triumphed? These were sudden and heady thoughts. In the black silence of the night they made my blood hot, my eye keen. I tasted fresh blood and I saw my enemy in pain, begging for his life.

  I would medicine him, poison him, kill him. I knew how to do it from the old man who taught me everything—Mirage. Right then, right there, I sat down. I planned my medicines. I even mixed some from a pouch and the ground beside me, for I knew a recipe. That night, I sent the greasy old duck, Shesheeb, a dream in which his penis hopped off his body then became a cricket and was snapped up by a thrush as he lunged to save it. A dream where his rear end spoke and his lips were sealed. Where the road turned to stew and he bent to eat it and broke his few remaining precious teeth on the rocks. I went further. The blackness overcame me then. I sent a dream where I sank my teeth into his throat and ripped through his guts with claws grown as sharp as an eagle’s. I laughed without mercy and crushed him with my slow weight. I tied him up and spat on him. I humbled him. I devoured him and I spat out the bones.

  When morning came I made my way back into the cabin to crawl, spent from my imaginary victories, into bed beside Margaret. My mind was still crowded with ghosts. But thinking of my sister had strengthened my heart. I would not be beaten. Not again. Not this time. I would save Margaret whether she liked it or not.

  THE NEXT MORNING was the Feast Day of some purse-mouthed saint or other, and to the surprise of Margaret, I was nothing but pleasant as she readied herself for Mass. Even when she put on her great black coalhod bonnet, the one she believed gave her an irresistible allure, I only complimented her.

  “It casts a mysterious shadow upon your face,” I said. “It makes a man wonder just what you might do next.”

  “This, probably,” she said, and whacked my shin with the stick she used for walking. But I could tell she was unnerved by my sudden too-affable acceptance of her flirtation. Maybe she was even disappointed. For sure, as she left the cabin, she was just a little anxious, since she may have sensed the cold truth of what my plan called for. Having taken advantage of the situation, having decided to turn things my way, I decided to use Margaret as bait.

  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.”