Four Souls (3 page)

I stand there with the bottle and spoon in my hand, quite useless, allowing the scene to resolve itself. It is over. But as I look at the back of her, at Fantan, at the heavy and relaxed form between them, words form against the inside of my skull. I can see them. They make no sense and yet compel me with their vehemence.

Polly Elizabeth
, I read,
you’ve been hoaxed
.

Nanapush

I
SHARED WITH
Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it—we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed.

We had only the barest sympathy for those who brought our losses upon us. So when she saw the anguish of the white man, Mauser, that day, Fleur did not rush to him out of a merciful heart.

Though she swooped down in her dress with the stiff white apron wings, she did not descend to save him like an angel of zhaaginaash hope. She gathered the man to herself and fixed his thrashing limbs, smoothed the boil of his tortured blood, pried his fists open, and unstuck his tongue from the back of his throat. But she did these good things for her own benefit, not his. As she helped the cook and the manservant drag him to his bed where the sister proceeded to tie him, she thought of what she might make of that malleable substance, his suffering. How she could benefit herself.

“He must be immobilized!” the sister cried out, her jaws locked in a frenzy of righteousness. “Immobilized at once!”

The woman seemed fond of the word, as Fleur described it, and she used it constantly and made the most of it, dragging out the long
o
and allowing her voice to tremble on each syllable. Elizabeth used strips of cotton sheeting, bandages that she’d had Fleur tear to a precise length and then stitch with a rolled hem. Fastening the man into the bed was evidently a task that this sister accomplished with a certain pleasure. First, she fussed over the neatness of the ties and she tested the knots with a motherly frown. She plucked at the taut strips to make certain they gave the right pressure. After rounding the bed several times to measure her work, she lifted the eyelid of her brother-in-law with a pale, curved thumb. Then she made her mistake. With officious concern, she put her finger underneath his nose to ascertain that he still drew breath. When her hand passed before his mouth, he snapped at it from below the surface of his consciousness and caught her thumb neatly as a fish grabs a fly. He sank a tooth deep. Hell-shrieks! The sister’s lungs blasted an eerie steam whistle and the great round woman who did the cooking barged in. The cook seated herself directly on top of the poor man and pinched his nose shut. Which did nothing, as he breathed through his clenched teeth and through the blood of the howling sister, who beat upon him with a failing vigor until at last she collapsed in a dead faint over the cook’s lap, her finger still caught.

At that point, Fleur, who had watched the commotion with amused interest, took charge once again. She untied the bindings with a few sharp movements and pushed back the heavy cook with one hand. She extracted the torn finger of the sister and set her, also, to one side. At once, the cook enlisted the manservant’s assistance in carrying the sister to her room. Fleur was left alone with John James Mauser, who suddenly took note of her and narrowed his eyes.

“Anishinaabekwe, na?” he inquired, though exhausted.

She was silent, hiding her surprise. She wondered immediately why a man like Mauser might know her language. But Fleur didn’t wonder hard enough. She had an arrogance that held her mind back. Otherwise she might have got the story right there, from the beginning. If she’d only asked, got him talking, he might have spilled his sorry history. I could have told her that Mauser got his start where he ended up—with the trees. I could have told her how he took advantage of one loophole and then another. How in his earliest days, handsome and clever, he had married young Ojibwe girls straight out of boarding school, applied for their permits to log off the allotment lands they had inherited. Once their trees were gone he had abandoned his young wives, one after the next.

That didn’t happen on our reservation, but I’d heard of it from others. The Ojibwe absorbed the children he left behind. They became us, not him. The young girls he had left went on to marry other men, but he took the sweetness of their youth just as he stripped off the ancient pine from their lands. Stumps and big bellies was all he left behind. I could have given the story to Fleur, but she never told me where she was going, never asked my advice. So although she was suspicious of his familiarity, she never got at the truth of John James Mauser until it was too late. Of course, it probably would not have mattered what an old man said. She was that dedicated to the shape of her plan.

Fleur began to heal John James Mauser in secret. She burned sweet grass and sage to cleanse the air in his room, gave him swamp tea to purify his blood. Then she began to work on his arms and legs, smoothing them from the inside. After his deep fits his muscles had clenched and contorted, and then froze that way. Fleur learned how to undo the body with a violent kindness of touch. Her fingers were immensely strong. Her grip a steel probe. She unlatched his shoulders and neck. Bit by bit, she untied his cramped muscles, his locked and tortured limbs. She tapered him off the medicines they had been giving him, and his mind cleared. As the constant pain lessened, as Mauser sipped the strong teas and the new Anishinaabeg mashkiki she brewed, he himself might have wondered, after all, why?

There is a simple explanation: when Fleur saw how Mauser already suffered, she felt cheated of her revenge. She wanted the man healthy so that she could destroy him fresh.

F
ROM THE
bottom of the house, Fleur listened up through its pipes and registers. She got to know the house that way, became familiar with every sound that humans could make, and so knew, from her little room at the base, all that was happening above. She traced the sly, masked gait of Fantan and the firm, prideful steps of Polly Elizabeth. She knew the sister’s dreamy slide, that wife of Mauser’s whom she hardly ever encountered, and then there was the broad footfall belonging to the cook, and at last the agonized, slow, lost creak of Mauser’s progress as he made his way from one room to the next though not, as he had before, seated in a wicker-woven wheelchair with metal and rubber wheels. No, after he began Fleur’s treatments and continued them, he was at least on his feet.

Once he stood, something happened to the configuration of the household. Before, he had been content to be manipulated in his pain, dragged here, dragged there, set in the window like a plant. Once he stood, he began, almost without anyone noticing it at first, to direct the energy of the household. This direction was accomplished mainly through the leaving of things in new places. Before, everything was taken from him when he finished with it, given to him when he asked for it, controlled. Now he was apt to fetch things for himself and replace them where he pleased. And although this may seem like a small thing, it was in fact a very large thing that he did. For he was unpredictable now—he could be here, he could be anywhere. And the objects he left and was able to reach often surprised people and put them on guard. It had been much easier for everyone, of course, when he was a paralyzed lump.

Now Mauser might be found in the library, at a table, one end of which was spread with his business papers. He muttered and fiercely cracked book spines as he paged through ledgers untouched for years. Or he’d surprise the cook tippling good brandy in the kitchen where he’d wandered in search of a heel of bread. He might be examining a stamp, holding it up with a tweezers so it caught the most intense and clear southern light, scanning it with a magnifying glass. Or he might be settling himself at his correspondence or even doing what looked like mathematical calculations across sheet after sheet of paper. Or he might even give an order or ask for a specific type of food, but what he didn’t do yet and what no one expected of him, anyway, was that he take charge. That would happen. Fleur would see to it, and then it would see to her.

O
NCE SHE
’
D
memorized the sounds of the house above, Fleur came upstairs and got to know the house the way a hunter knows the woods. Which floorboards creaked and which were silent. Which steps groaned and which held firm. She greased the hinges of the doors and cupboards. She memorized the lay of the house so that she would be able to tread it easily upon the black night of her choosing. Each night she practiced, she roamed. No one knew it. The house obliged her by standing solid, refusing to shift even in the bluster of winds and roiling snow. The house was well made, thus predictable, the mortars set tight between the stones, the wooden interior pinned smoothly wall to floor. Fleur became so adept in her movements and knowledge that she regularly visited the sleepers, even Fantan, and watched them until she knew their habits even to the regularity of snores and the restless gulp of dreams. She marked the petulant tossing of Placide, and the chilly, deathlike stillness of her sister, Elizabeth. The cook growled mountainously with each breath. Though tongueless, Fantan talked in his sleep. Only Mauser stayed awake.

There was a lamp next to his bed. She saw the crack of radiance below the door. Heard the rustle of stiff pages in a book as he turned them, slowly, reading himself through the deepest hours. Sometimes she frowned as she listened, and in utter silence crept to the wall and settled herself in order to ascertain just when he’d sleep. When he would stop reading and douse the light. The answer never varied. He read until dawn. Slept a few gray hours. Woke in a wretched temper and cursed all he saw and knew.

He suffered an excess of self-sympathy—of that much we can be positive.

In a crack of shadow beside his door, night after night, Fleur marked the turning of pages and grew impatient. Restlessness had plagued her ever since she had entered the house. After all, she was used to great spaces and large doings. She missed getting her own meat and medicines, catching her own fish, snaring rabbits and looping the necks of roosting partridge, the repair and upkeep of her cabin, canoe, traps, and gun, and most of all she missed the care of her daughter. In a strange fit of disconnection, she imagined that she longed for Lulu far more than the girl would miss her. After all, school was a child’s world, far from all that Fleur knew. Never having gone to such a place, she imagined it consisted of toys, games, play, children shrieking with excitement—all she’d seen of schools were children at recess. So she fell into the trap, like Mauser, of pitying herself. The great and strong, how is it that they can be so feeble in this regard? Sometimes it seems to me that it’s the old sodden weaklings like myself who have the least mercy on our own persons. Maybe we expect nothing. Or have been through far too much. Maybe we are just bottomlessly foolish. At any rate those two, one the shadow of a shadow in the hall and the other a shadow also, an imitation of the ruthless man who’d stolen from the world with careless ease, both poised, caught in time.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered, and Fleur was bound to go where she was sent. Maybe in those long nights as she watched the crack of light beneath the door, she had an inkling. She thought revenge was behind that door, and satisfaction. Maybe she began to realize that she was wrong. There was only time. For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

Though Fleur was immensely disciplined, the wait got to be too much for her. She sank down against the wall one night, still frowning at the band of light that said Mauser was sleepless. Annoyed with everything to do with him and with her situation, she brooded. The sharp anger that kept her wakeful dulled. Her thoughts drifted. She longed for the trusting touch of her daughter, grew angry at the man behind the door, forgot him, ached for her daughter, grew angry at the man again. Felt that self-pity that they both felt, on either side of the door. Finally, resenting that she had to waste her time to take revenge, she fell asleep.

I haven’t said this, but she had a tendency to snore.

The snores of a beautiful woman are both ridiculous and somehow moving. I know. Recall, she had lived in my cabin. Slumped in that grand hallway with her face tipped back, unguarded, her skin exquisitely molded over the stern bones, her eyes up-slanted, the bitter perfection of her lips stuck half open, she breathed an even gurgling gnash. Fleur’s snores, her self-betrayal, started softly and then increased in volume as she fell deeper into her sleep. Mauser, in his bed of feather down and fancy silk quilts and ruffed pillows, set his book aside. At the sound of the snores, he was alarmed. He imagined that Fantan had come to curl at his door, out of a protective instinct or because he’d had a bad dream himself. Or if not Fantan, perhaps, he thought, one of his old hunting dogs had been mistakenly left out of his plush night kennel and might catch cold on the floor. He turned his light off, and here is why Fleur did not hear him. Mauser also knew precisely where the creaks hid in the floor. He trod his way around the noisy boards when he wished not to rouse Polly Elizabeth. Now he padded to the door in absolute silence, and opened it. As Fleur herself had greased the hinges, the door made no sound. And as it was a night of moon radiance and the light streamed in the window behind him and the windows at either end of the hall, it was easy for Mauser to see at once that the source of the rumbling snores was no wornout cur, but a woman. A most extraordinary woman—the laundress who’d revived him. Her face caught the light as though it were poured of tarnished silver. Her face was sculpted of the fabulous dark side of a mirror. Or deep water. Or time, as I’ve said. Her face gave back an idealized reflection and Mauser was caught in it. That strange beauty emitting snorts and whistles. Oblivious. He watched her curiously for a while, and then he suddenly smiled. He shut the door. Crawled back between the covers. She never knew, but here it was. Like a child reaching into the lake and pulling out a fish, like a fish flipping out of the fry pan into a stream that rushes to the lake, like a dog biting randomly and hauling from the air a rump steak, she got her prize. She had caught him in her sleep.