Four Souls (12 page)

“She hated you?” I said this in an aghast tone, but a split second later I was of course not surprised, thinking, yes, of course she hated you. She came here hating you. I see that now. Her dark figure on that white, white day. A cipher. A keyhole. I was the one who admitted her into this house. It was no accident. She found you because she wished to destroy you but then she started healing you and found that once she’d healed you she could not kill you. For who can destroy what one has put back together with such care? And then the boy—you after all are the father of her son. She loves him. Therefore, she can’t kill you. So she is trapped. I said this last sentence aloud. He did not acknowledge it, though I know he heard.

“Of course she hated me. She came here to skin me and had a very sharp knife to do it with. But the whiskey got her, as it does so many of her people. It will waste her in a few years. Already, she’s gotten careless. It won’t be long.”

“How can you speak in such a heartless fashion?” I was angry. “You profess to love her, and yet you will watch her be destroyed.”

“There is no helping her, don’t you see? The stuff is poison to them. It’s their downfall. They’d have beaten us back and kept their lands if it wasn’t for the liquor. They can’t help it. One taste, one teaspoon of it, and they’re utterly doomed.”

Now he forgot to smoke his sad cigar. Real feeling seized him. His eyes whelmed with felt tears and he looked at me with something like appeal.

“I almost wish she would kill me,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I cannot watch the wreck she will become. She’s caught me somehow.” He touched the breast of his jacket, softly, with the tips of his fingers. “It isn’t just her face, either, or the figure she cuts. It isn’t that I married her for notoriety, as some say, but only that I couldn’t bear not to have her near. God,” his voice went ragged. “I had to have her and I swear to you there was no other way. Only now do I understand that I had to get near something in her that I can’t know, some pure space, something that I went up north to have and only ended up destroying. It is the same with her,” he nearly wailed, and then I thought, oh, he feels sorry for
himself
. He regained control and spoke with a surface sincerity. “I am a greedy man. I have always been a greedy man and always wanted to live like this”—he waved his arm around the oak-paneled room—“and now I do, for the next few months anyway. After that, I think…”

“What,” I said, knowing this was where he’d wanted to lead me. “Tell me the worst!”

“I think it’s all gone. I think you must find yourself a new place to live. Go back to your sister.”

I took that in. The fire crackled in the hearth. I gestured to my glass and he poured out fingers of brandy for us both.

“Fleur is my sister, now,” I said. “I think I’ll cast my lot with her.”

Mauser looked at me in astonishment. His mouth actually dropped open. He gave a bark of laughter. “She’ll go back! She’ll go back there to live, I suppose! I have nothing. I plan to leave the country with all that I can pry from my bankers before the great rout, and she refuses to come with me.”

“She probably misses her family,” I said sharply to him, trying to fight off my appalled shock. The world, indeed, was breaking apart. I could function only by remaining dry and allowing my old vinegar into my voice.

“Her family?” Now he laughed a good deal longer. “She hasn’t any. She’s the last of them.”

“Well, she’s got me now,” I said, rising, rustling my skirt. I seemed to grow taller in my own skin. “If she’ll have me, she’s got Miss Gheen.”

Nanapush

M
ARGARET SLOWLY
and methodically began to gather the materials that she would use in making the medicine dress. Just as she had said, nothing upon it could be made by a whiteman, which was not easy as chimookomaanag popped up everywhere—stole the land next door and put a farm on it, walked the agency town’s streets, even prayed in our missionizing church. Margaret couldn’t use glass beads to decorate her dress, but as in the old days she must use deer clackers, teeth, quills, and the bones of small birds. This required the painstaking hunting of those animals, which I did with a good will, as I thought my efforts might redeem me from the terrible mistake of the snare. Bine, or partridge, sat juicy in the comfort of the tree branches. I knew how to catch them with a wire hooked to the top of a long pole. Plucked and roasted, the birds were delicate meat, sweet and tender. I also let it be known that I was collecting these bird bones, and would be glad to clean up the remnants of various partridges cooked throughout the reservation.

These were good times. These were the sorts of jobs I liked— catching food, visiting about, eating roast partridges. Whenever I returned with a load of quills or bird bones, Margaret rewarded me in ways I can only dream of, now, looking back. Gizhe Manito had smiled on me then and smoothed my way. I had lived through great sorrows and, as though to reward me, I was given for that short time all I needed for happiness. But such times are brief. We should never think happiness will last. We shouldn’t chase it, for the faster we do the faster it recedes. I was happy all through the making of that dress, so I suppose that proves its power. But maybe, with Margaret, with the treasure of our love, I tried too hard to hold on to what is only fleeting, and fragile, and I destroyed it with my clumsy ways.

I
F ONLY
Nector hadn’t come home again, things would perhaps have gone on forever in a pleasant dream. I wanted to live in love until Margaret and I faded into the next world, worn smooth and transparent by the rubbing of skin on skin. I wanted nothing but the happiness of falling asleep in each other’s arms, craved only the calm discriminations of old age manaa. But there was Nector one afternoon, sitting on a rock beside the door eating bannock. Margaret beamed down on him like the moon. I was glad to see Nector as if he were my own son, for we understood things in a similar fashion. He was smart, and for sure, he’d grown up to arrange the features of his mother and father in the best possible combination. All the girls admired his looks. It was my task to keep him from falling prey to vanity—an uncle’s responsibility.

“All that manaa you’re having is making you thin,” I said, “the bones are poking through your skin. Most unattractive.”

“Just one bone counts,” he glanced down, “with women.”

“More like a rope,” I said, critical, “a short little piece.”

“Yours is,” laughed Nector, stuffing a huge grease-covered chunk of pikwezhigan into his mouth. “Bread and lard make you hard,” he mocked in a singsong voice.

“Neither one of you have much to brag of,” said Margaret, sitting down with us. “Women come to you out of pity.” But she smiled at me from the corner of her eyes to let me know that this was not the case. My heart swelled up. That moment was very dangerous. I experienced a collision of desires. First, I wanted to make the moment last with Margaret, in the hope it would lead to other things. She had been generous two nights ago. Would my luck hold out? Second, I wanted to keep on teasing Nector, for his own good. Third, what was it? I couldn’t remember. An old man’s thoughts fly in and out of his head. Oh yes. There was something I had to avoid, like a treacherous rock. It could rip the bottom of my boat. But it was hidden. I couldn’t recall in that moment exactly what I was attempting to avoid and so like someone trying to steer away I instead disremembered the place and was drawn right to it.

“You’re pretty good at snaring women,” I said to Nector, “but you can’t keep them, I hear.”

As soon as I said the word, I remembered with a jolt of panic,
snare, snare, snare
! Immediately, my brain spun. I tried to throw down a distracting piece of nonsense about the famous quality of Margaret’s bannock, praised it loud, out of desperation, but Nector had already seized on the word I feared.

“Snaring?” he began to laugh.

“I can’t hold myself back!” I cried, lunging over him, “I must have yet another piece of this bread. Old woman, you have a way with your cooking that—”

“Snares you every time,” said Nector, feeling hilarious. “That reminds me—”

“Gego!” I cried out, hoping he’d recall that I had requested his silence on the long-ago incident I knew he’d just remembered. “Aaargh!” I fell upon the ground, as though unconscious, and began to writhe and moan. They disregarded me except to find in my agony a source of humor.

“Look how the old man pretends he’s poisoned. Very funny. He does this all the time,” said Margaret fondly.

“He’s a sly one,” said Nector, approving of me, too. “Remember how he once snared Clarence Morrissey? He showed me how to set the wire and the two of us waited in the bush until we caught the dog. The Morrissey nearly choked to death, but found a toehold at the last moment. Of course, back then the old man told me to keep it a secret.”

Nector looked uncertainly at Margaret, whose mouth had dropped open and then slowly shut to a line. “I was just a boy,” he went on, nervously, “but now, what does it matter?” Nector noticed I had gone stiff on the ground. I was playing dead.

“Look, he’s playing dead,” he tried to change Margaret’s focus. “Convincing, isn’t he?”

“It won’t be play for long” was Margaret’s answer.

Then silence. I waited for her blows to fall upon me where I lay defenseless and stupid. But she did nothing, which made me even more afraid. I opened my eyes a crack, and my terror was confirmed. From the set of her mouth and the flash in her eyes, I knew she understood all and was reserving punishment. Mere browbeating, tongue lashing, ass kicking, and starvation of an old man would not be enough. She gave a chilly little grin, rose, and turned her back on the two of us.

“It is time for me to rest my old bones,” I said in despair. Then I crawled into the corner of the house and burrowed under a heap of blankets. I covered my face, bit my tongue, and turned to the wall. There, I prayed to the spirit of the turtle.

“Come help me,” I called on my dodem, the mekinak. “Not to stick out my head, my arms, my feet, my tail or niinag.” I thought that if I could only contain myself and stay beneath the covers, Margaret might progress to the end of her anger and find there a morsel of tenderness. The good priest tells us that miracles are part of ordinary life, but not for the lazy or the wicked, and I was both according to the Catholics. As it turned out, I was bound to suffer. To absorb a hard medicine. And Margaret knew exactly what to cook up for the poor old man and how to deliver it most drastically.

So I had snared her. She would snare me right back. We both knew that she was doing it and both of us knew why, but neither of us had the courage to dismantle the barrier of hard sticks, pointed words, and prickles of jealousy that soon tangled like deep bush between us. I knew she had divined the true prey of that snare I’d set, figured out the reason I tried to kill him, and decided to resurrect my jealousy and use Shesheeb as a weapon. Although I was aware of her ploy, I couldn’t help her scorn from cutting, or the thorns of her words from piercing deep.

One night, she hummed in an irritating manner, beneath her breath. “Ninimoshe,” she finally let me hear her singing, “sweet-heart, little duck, speak softly, for my old man will hear you creeping underneath my blanket.”

Of course, after that I tossed all night, at each little noise, imagining the absurd picture of the greasy old duck sneaking into our cabin. Now that she slept across the room from me, such a thing was remotely possible. I began to sleep by the door, but then I feared the window. The upshot was I got no sleep at all.

“People say they know the old man down the road,” she said to me slyly the next day, “but not as I do. His powers are significant. Why, he can turn himself into a fly, buzz about, listen in on people.”

I tried to bite my tongue, to keep my temper from flaring up. A fly! Saaah! That time, I succeeded. But other times I did not. She laughed, now, when I insisted on accompanying her to Holy Mass. For years, she had begged my presence, hoping to convert one more soul for Father Damien and lure me into a church marriage. Now she refused to let me walk beside her.

“Don’t follow!” She whacked the earth with her walking stick, and glared. “I’ll kick you sideways if you sneak after me!”

I soon grew to think it would be better for me to live in the woods with the bears than endure the insults she heaped on my head in the form of admiring remarks about Shesheeb. She boasted of the old man’s hunting skills, and how he always had fresh game—waawaashkeshi or mooz.

“Never gopher! Never things I’ve seen you eat!”

“What would you know? You never cook for me anymore.” I tried to make myself meek and pitiful. “You’ll come home from Holy Mass one day and find me dried up in the corner, starved to death.”

“Go snare something then,” she said, heartless.

She walked out laughing at me, came back with bird bones for her dress. I didn’t ask where she got them, only if I could help her dye them red with the bark of speckled alder I’d gathered in atonement.

“You?” She looked at me and sniffed, as though I were covered with moowan. “You might interfere with the dress’s healing properties.”

In other words, she didn’t trust that I wouldn’t contaminate her medicine dress. This cut me deeper than anything she’d done so far and I let myself be naked in my speech.

“I’ve got nothing in my heart but love for you.”

“Nothing in your pants either.”

And with a cruel laugh, she sat against the shady side of the cabin to work on her dress, which after all this time was just about finished. I must admit, she was very patient and did a good job on it. The dress was made of a moosehide she’d pounded and stretched and rubbed to a velvet softness. She’d used raspberry leaf and root dyes to color the bird bones, and unlike the harsh, bright glare of the trader’s beads, these soft pinks and purples put roses in that woman’s cheeks. I said so.

“Don’t touch” was all she answered. “My roses have pickers so long they could pierce your heart and kill you.”

I watched the colors reflect into her face as she sewed that afternoon. She used a fish bone for a needle, sinew for thread. I crept close to her, thinking that maybe the medicine dress would do its healing work and bring us together, but the opposite happened.

“My, my,” she clucked her tongue, her eyes sparking with malicious fire, “I’m dizzy. That old man down the road gave me a sip of wine!”

There comes a time when you reach the last bitter drop that your gullet can hold. That was it. Her words filled me with such hot rage that I had to ice my feelings instantly, or I’d explode. I imagined packing heavy snow around my heart, and made my choice. That was it. I’d had enough. I started walking down the road. She wanted wine? I’d bring wine. I could get it for her. I knew where. Sister Hildegarde Anne made the parish communion wine and kept it in the convent cellar, which opened from a side door with a flimsy bolt that had been placed there years ago, right after I’d taken a few bottles and had a ripping good time. That bolt could easily be jiggled out of place. This time, I’d steal the whole cask, I decided. I’d bring it back to our cabin and have a party with my sweetheart. She wanted wine? I’d get wine. Our love would be just like old times, way back when. We’d have a bush dance for just the two of us! My stride quickened and in spite of myself my heart thawed. My thoughts pumped with hope and a young man’s zeal. Once I made town, I visited around, chewed snuff, collected a few more tiny bones for my woman’s dress. I killed time until it was dark, then crept close to the convent. Crouched beneath an open window, I heard the nuns say their nightly prayers.

“God comfort you, my daughters,” I whispered as they doused their lamps and each made her way to a lonely cell. “May you each get laid.”

After I pronounced my blessing, I waited until they slept and then I slipped up to the cellar door and quietly fiddled with the catch. I used a splinter of partridge bone jammed in the crack between the door and frame to ease the bolt from its casing. It didn’t take long. The cool winey air, earth scented and moldy, rushed at my face as I slipped inside. I lighted a match and by its flare saw that the casks were there for the taking. I hefted the first little wooden keg onto my shoulder, eased out of the cellar quietly, and set out for home. It had been a very long time since I’d tasted wine. In my youth, it made me foolish, stole my brain, and left a bannock between my ears. Drink caused me to sing and gamble, to fight, to chase women who belonged to other men, and even for a short time to forsake the pipe that my father gave me. Liquor did not get the best of my life, but I knew well its powers. I had taken no wine or liquor for many years because I had experienced its evils. And yet, at that moment, all I could think of was its delights—the sour and delicious odor of the fumes that the keg exuded made my mouth water. The air was heavy and growing heavier. I set the cask down and took a rest beside the road. If I should have a drink, I thought, my load would be one drink lighter. So sitting there, in the dark, I took my first drink in many years.

The wine went down easy. The keg went back up slow. An old and familiar warmth burned in my gut and then swirled up around my heart. Again, I started off for home. The moon was up and just bright enough for me to make out the road. As I walked on, the warm thrill of wine reached my tongue and untied it. I found myself singing an old love song.
You are paddling away, my sweetheart. But I will come after you. Marry me tonight.
Into my thoughts came pictures of the happiness that Margaret and I would feel once we’d put aside all of our foolish attempts to best each other at the jealous game of revenge. Do you hear me correctly? Do you understand what I am telling you? What began as a scheme between Margaret and me to get the best of each other ended up getting the best of us both. Revenge ran away with us, and then it turned around and ran over us. Flattened us good. It is also the case, and I know you’ve remarked it, that my struggle with love and wine paralleled in some ways the journey of Fleur on this earth. We both were tempted, and succumbed. This happens even to strong persons, and perhaps it is most dangerous of all for us to stumble. For we are subject to the worst shame, those of us who are too proud. It is hard for us to admit that we can be tricked by the same ordinary firewater that tricks the common idiot. But the booze makes no distinction, and the smarter we are, the more elaborate our reasons for guzzling.