Four Souls (8 page)

Just as the first of us had failed at growing or herding or plowing the fields, we were told we could sign a piece of paper and get money for the land, but that no one would take the land until we paid the money back. Mortgage, this was called. This piece of banker’s cleverness sounded good to many. I spoke against this trick, but who listened to old Nanapush? People signed the paper, got money. Some farmed. Others came home night after night for months full of whiskey and food. Suddenly the foreclosure notice was handed out and the land was barred. It belonged to someone else. Now it appeared that our people would turn into a wandering bunch, begging at the back doors of white houses and town buildings. Then laws were passed to outlaw begging and even that was solved. No laws were passed to forbid starvation, though, and so the Anishinaabeg were free to do just that.

Yes, we were becoming a solved problem. That’s what I’m saying. Who worries about the dead? They are safe in the ground.

N
ECTOR OWNED
land that was allotted to him as a child, though he wasn’t old enough to take care of it yet. Nector’s land was half slough, but that’s not bad, that’s where the ducks land. Part field if you wanted field, or clearing, and part dense birch woods with burnt-over patches where raspberries and blueberries and tart high-bush cranberries sprouted. This land was waiting for Nector, but then one day as I was making my way back to our cabin from town, where I had traded for a jar of maple syrup, I saw that a motorized wagon as well as an ox-drawn wagon and three chimookomaanag were making a road on Nector’s land. I stopped. They were chopping birch down and loading them. Clearing another field just past that.

I walked up to one of them, a brown-haired chimookomaan who gave the orders, and I said to him, “What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like, old savage? Get the hell outta here or I’ll fix your ugly face.”

He turned away and his young muscled back covered with a moss brown shirt was like a mute wall. How this one set of humans came to be so often afflicted with a common blindness strains my powers. It’s a sad thing. I quietly turned away and as I meekly disappeared around the side of their truck I added, to the gas in their tank, the maple syrup that I was bringing home for Margaret. I hated to waste good syrup, but the young pup had given me no choice.

I went home intending to speak immediately to Margaret about the matter. Her round ojiid greeted me, for she was crouched on her hands and knees when I came in. She was laying a stick marked with red lines around the bottom logs of the cabin, muttering to herself. After a while I figured out that she was measuring the floor.

“What are you doing?” I said for the second time that afternoon. And just like the thick, muscled young man clearing Nector’s land, she turned her back on me. She wouldn’t talk to me. After a time I understood it wasn’t that she was angry, just that she was absorbed in some female dealing of her own. I watched her place the stick just so and mutter to herself until I got bored, and then I gave up and left her. Later, I regretted it, for I had to find out what Margaret had done from Bernadette Morrissey.

“S
OLD IT
,” said Bernadette with the agent’s desk between us. “Or at least part. The eighty acres that adjoins hers, she kept.”

I had to make Bernadette repeat what she’d told me in Ojibwemowin in order to make certain I had the sense of it. And then, once I was satisfied that the horse-face spoke the truth, once I had looked upon the papers for myself, I was afflicted by a sorrowful anger. My sweetheart, my porcupine woman, my prickly dove, had exchanged the real ground for the false ground. My Margaret had betrayed us. She had bought her linoleum and given away Nector’s earth.

N
OW
M
ARGARET
had stood up with the Pillagers, and she had fought for the land. She had ignored the threats of Agent Tatro. She had fought against Agent Tatro, against the Lazarres and Morrisseys, and she had enjoyed every battle. Through the worst of things, she came out urging defiance. When her head was shaved, she’d got more vigorous instead of hiding away in shame. Her rage increased in the cold wind around her ears. The coalhod bonnet I bought for her inspired her fierce tirades and gave her confidence to rail against the agent with gall and fire. True, she had diverted the money meant to pay off the Pillager fees and applied it on Kashpaw land—but it was done in defense at least of keeping some share of the earth. Margaret was always for the land, if nothing else. Nothing stopped her in this quest, until that linoleum. Because of it, she betrayed herself, and worse, she betrayed her son.

S
O WHEN
I came home days after I’d found out about the sale, and when I saw that she had fit this new covering onto the floor, I did not speak. I didn’t trust myself. So much given for so little. A false and foolish thing. Margaret’s eye challenged me to take issue and have my say. But I did not. She knew that I knew the truth, but I said nothing, which mystified her at first. I merely shook out the newspaper that I’d picked up in town and sat down on my little bench beside the door. All that afternoon, I sat there refusing to work, an old man in the sun, while Margaret put the finishing touches on her floor. After it was glued to boards placed on the earth, smoothed, and waxed, she spent a very long time enraptured by it, moving the chair to one side, then the other, then back and forth, making a racket I knew was calculated to upset me and stir my annoyance until I boiled over and relieved her. I did not let that happen. For in truth I was afflicted with something I can’t describe—perhaps a human embarrassment. Finally, she came outside and sat down beside me, eager for me to let fly at her in rage. Still, I didn’t. She tried to goad me.

“How do you like the new floor?” She gave a sweet, punishing emphasis to each of the words.

I would not be trapped so easily. I nodded and said nothing. Even when she asked me so many times that it grew insulting, I could not respond. As the day dwindled, the sun from the west intensified beneath low clouds and picked out the undersides of all the leaves in gold. Margaret asked me again and again. I remained silent. Finally she quit talking and sat next to me as the light darkened in the trees.

The blue came out of the bushes. The black came out of the earth. The night was windless, moonless. I wanted to forgive her. Several times I tried to speak. But I never found the words.

Polly Elizabeth

T
HE BOY
refused to wean himself and wouldn’t be coaxed onto a bottle or even a cup. He stumbled to his mother and threw himself into her lap. Even yanked at the buttons of her shirt and bawled in fury until she gave in and allowed him to suck. She indulged him, I thought, a bit too long for decency, but that could hardly be helped as he was so adamant. He yelled when she refused him. His roar was of a bullish intensity that filled the house with growling echoes. But when allowed the breast, he closed his eyes, clung to her with sweet trust, and was the picture of such relieved desperation that I could not imagine refusing him myself.

When he was satisfied and when he was rapt in his play, I don’t believe there ever was a prettier or more loving child. Oh, he didn’t like to speak, but why should he? Every need of his was anticipated and then met before it even formed in his mind. He walked and ran and even pulled himself up the stairs at a precocious number of months. His teeth came in and shone like pearls. His hair grew long, we clipped it, then it grew in thicker yet and in summer turned a surprising pale flax color. He wore skirts and gowns. It hurt us when we had to put him in boy pants at the insistence of his father. To watch Fleur dote upon him warmed me. She was sad as I was at each sign of babyhood put away, and if he didn’t speak at two years it concerned us less than it concerned his father. Fleur and I and the boy understood one another to such perfection that words were utterly unnecessary. We could play for hours in the wide sun-filled nursery and in the zoo and parks. That was true happiness. The boy brought it out of us.

During this time, Fleur made a number of day trips that, I was given to understand, had to do with a daughter by a former liaison. The girl now resided in a boarding school, and Fleur was intent on getting her to live with us. Each time Fleur left, I awaited her return with excitement, and told the boy he’d best prepare to have an older sister. But each time the driver pulled the dusty car around the curve of the drive, Fleur sat alone in the backseat. There was no child. She never let me know the entire reason she returned alone, but I understood in time that it had something to do with the girl’s wishes, her pride. And so it was, the boy alone reigned over our little kingdom, and although we tried not to spoil him, it was obvious at last that we had done so. He was a commanding little thing and could get the better of us with a gesture.

One day, as Fleur was tumbling back and forth on the figured carpet of the nursery, laughing with her boy, John James Mauser entered the room. He stood watching the two at their wild play, his face rapt and charmed. Fleur was reserved around him, held herself stiffly and never smiled. It was a mystery to me why Mauser had chosen to marry her, for I’d never seen her give to him one signal of affection. He did not seem to miss it, somehow, but took his pleasure in watching her at times like these—when she was unguarded, unaware that he was watching, entirely natural. She was playful, then. I knew that side of her well. We even shared it. A love of foolishness perhaps only possible with an innocent child.

“Don’t stop,” said Mauser, putting up his hand when Fleur noticed him and froze. It was remarkable how she could suddenly become another person in his presence. She wasn’t cold, exactly, nor did she seem angry or filled with some hidden and resenting energy. She was simply solemn and watchful. She was decorous. Within that room, she raised herself and gave the boy over into my arms. When she walked to Mauser it was with an upright gliding grace that the most polished women in Minneapolis society might envy. She took his arm. A talented mimic, she had quickly perfected her carriage, manners, behavior, by steady observation of other women.

“We must go now,” she said, and as she swept past him, taking his arm, I saw that hot glow in his eyes. It was always there. He burned in the grip of some blandishment. She must know spells, I always thought, for to elicit such devotion one would think she might make some tender movement toward him. Show him some slight mark of love. He had apparently accepted his fate, though, to love unrequited and with a simple, fateless, heat. Whatever spell she laid on him, I wish I knew its verse. Can there be anything quite so remarkable and pure as devotion without recompense, devotion for devotion’s art?

He folded her arm against his breast and they went out, who knows where, to some dinner, and I was left with the boy. I remember that day, it sticks. I cannot forget it. That is because it was the first day I saw something wrong with the child.

John James Mauser II had of course been to doctors, but all had pronounced him normal and even advanced, a credit to a father who sat on the hospital board. It occurs to me now that the doctors may have had suspicions, but that they had perhaps been afraid to speak frankly to one who possessed so much power over them individually and over the institution as a whole. Mauser was the hospital’s primary philanthropic benefactor. Who’d dare tell such a man that his child was damaged, unwhole, fractured in mind? I myself couldn’t do it, and even now I hasten to add that the boy was swift in certain other ways. Alert, he was alert in spirit I know that, though with a stranger he was apt to shut his eyes and become dull and heavy as a stone. I’d always made excuses. I saw what I wanted, doted on it, and disregarded any sign that did not fit.

But on that day, as we played sweetly together on the lion-shaped rug that his mother had bought, he suddenly went absent. He crouched beside me, very still, staring out the window into the empty sky. His blue eyes were just as vacant. He did not see me. He saw nothing, but could not be moved. For one hour, he sat there, me beside him, ever more frantically trying to coax his attention away from the nothingness where he had flown. But he was unswerving. His mouth fell open. His features coarsened into caricature. He was the very picture of idiocy. I cried out, swept him close to me, and then he began to babble. Those sounds, those syllables, those pathetic attempts. They were frightful, then, never mind the hideous they would become.

S
WIFT
in other ways. I said, didn’t I, that young Mauser who succeeded in breaking my heart on that calm day (where others more adept had failed) was swift in other ways? Well, so he was. The boy could count. By some strange and secret method he assigned to his little world numbers, numerical values, mathematical identities. I think it started with the card playing that Fleur taught him. For he picked it up and soon it was evident that he could make lightning calculations somewhere in his puzzle box of a brain. They played cards—all in all, it was the strangest sight I ever saw. She began by teaching him little simple games, harmless child’s games, but progressed until they immersed themselves daily in those matches, of which I know little, that occupy coarse men at coarse tables and are carried on under clouds of cigar smoke to the tune of clinking shot glasses. I may be too much a creature of social fears, or at any rate of rules and breeding, but I did think it wasn’t right for Fleur to teach the boy every kind of poker and gambler’s trick when he couldn’t yet recite the alphabet.

And yet she loved him to her heart’s end, yes, that could be seen. She did not believe the doctors Mauser took him to weekly, who pronounced the boy a hopeless idiot and cast his father into a depth. She remained as she was with him, cheerful and laughing. She drank her whiskey, but now more secretly I think. The only difference in their play was that mutual and growing passion for cards. John James Mauser, meanwhile, changed. Not that Fleur would have cared to note it. But he did change, he grew still more thoughtful, and where he had always made an outward show of the Roman Catholic faith, a hypocritical nod to the church when it suited his purpose, he now became a true believer. I alone saw this occur in him. No one else thought it remarkable he went to Mass every morning before his coffee was poured. No one else was aware he took daily Eucharist and made a score of confessions every month. I suppose, being who he was, he had a lot to confess. I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of the barrel of his sins?

As he was somewhat more approachable now, and as I had by sheer ubiquity become an accepted person—perhaps an accepted annoyance to Mauser, but nonetheless accepted—I thought to ask him about his fervent adoption of religious practice. To my surprise, he took me seriously, and answered. Perhaps I should have known it was the boy’s affliction that had prompted him.

“You were always aware, I think”—he regarded me with a sharp gaze—“of how I wanted a son. It was a dear wish of mine—it still is,” he amended quietly. “I feel that I am responsible for this one’s lack of…” He struggled. “…his abnormalities… his strangeness. I have come to believe that the boy’s backward traits are a judgment on the man I was.”

This amazing statement was forced out with honesty through pride. For the first time ever, I felt some human quality, a streak of humility, a signal of Mauser’s inner workings and life, that pulled at me. Mauser had avoided me ever since his illness, hating that I’d seen him weak and outside himself in the throes of appalling fits. Now, he seemed to have put aside that old shame. He allowed himself to speak with an exhaustive frankness. Apparently, having had the time to page back through his life, he found evidence all along of the workings of a certain presence.

“An inhuman presence,” he told me carefully. “I hesitate to assign God the tedious task of looking after me, but I’ve come to believe that I’ve been spared death many times in narrow circumstances by something, for something. For some reason.”

I sat alertly. “I would like to hear it.”

“Perhaps it is not for me to understand. If so, may it remain shrouded. But I have been spared, or rescued, or brought back to life, many times. When I was a boy, for instance, I fell through the ice of a deep pond and was known to have been submerged for nearly half an hour before I was dragged out. I came to. I survived that and I was only four years old. When I was a young hooligan I jumped a train but judged wrong and fell beneath it, managed to roll out between the wheels. Don’t know how I did it. Unscathed. And then in my lumbering days a Swede dropped a pine on me. Sure, it should have killed me. But two jagged branches that might have run me through pinned me beneath the trunk, supporting it so that I was merely tapped down a little into the soft duff. I fell off a scaffold once and was caught by the belt and hung there, sixty feet off the ground. I married Placide and on our wedding day the horses spooked and ran straight over me, you remember. Not one hoof mark. Stood and brushed myself off. There was the bullet Fantan took for me in the can of sardines.”

“What?” I said.

“A long story for another time.” He waved that off. “And then there was my long illness after I’d so ridiculously gone to war. I did some terrible things in my younger days and was always surprised and suspicious that luck seemed to reward rather than punish me. But now I think perhaps luck was just saving for my comeuppance. Or that the just desserts that skipped over me were visited upon my son.”

There she is, I thought the next day, watching from a nursery window as Fleur emerged from the car below.
His comeuppance.
It startled me to think like that, but the fact is, Mauser’s history had made me shiver. It rang true. I have stopped believing in a divine lookout, but Mauser’s luck was striking, or had been, until the grotesque collapse of his illness. And when Fleur cured him, I wondered now, was that a piece of good fortune or was it the beginning of a subterranean justice that now started, one catastrophe and then the next, to bring him down?

His investments began to fail. A lead mine collapsed. Securities he’d thought invulnerable to the world’s flux proved otherwise. A fertilizer plant he’d owned closed and he had to sell off those lands he’d acquired by means underhanded, anyway. He was unnerved, I could see it, uncertain. Even after he came home at night, he closeted himself for hours with his accountant. When he emerged he wore a desperate, foraging look. Still, an edifice of money built as large as Mauser’s, one that withstood all the world’s undoing, doesn’t go all at once. The daily features of life seemed changeless. The household still functioned with its usual extravagance and Mrs. Testor continued her profitable ways with the meats. Fleur’s account at the dress shop was paid and the couple still appeared at social events. With her hair piled high, she still displayed the bold profile and predatory grace of a swooping bird. Mauser, although he cut as fine a figure, wore an increasingly haunted look, though maybe
hunted
is the better word.

M
Y LOVE
for the boy, and the fact that I’d succeeded in drawing Mauser out on the subject of his religious habits, broke some ice between the two of us. Still, the old animosity I’d felt for his lurking manservant persisted until one day I asked about a detail of conversation that remained odd to me—Mauser’s mention of the can of sardines and the bullet. I then was told the story of the way the two men forged their bond.

We sat together in the breakfast room, in pale light, our coffee on delicate gold-rimmed saucers. I wondered if he might sell them to me when the house went, then quashed my greedy thought. Mauser lighted a small cheroot and began to speak.

“My war starts with a can of sardines, a small can, unworthy of mayhem. I see it sitting in the dim illumination, there on the low table, its wrapper a bright yellow, cheerful, centering the group of men.”

He tapped the cigar. I let him go on, didn’t stop as he waxed thoughtful.

M
OLES
, human gophers, that’s what we were. Burrowing creatures. I loved the dirt, craved the solid gray promise of it, nosed into the cold black safety, set my shoulders into the swing of the pick, the shovel, or dug with my face when the shelling commenced. Fantan too, here, he can tell you we loved dirt. I don’t care if it was wet or dry or stank of human rot. Life in the trenches fostered adoration of the muck and the shit of survival. Don’t make a face! Queen Polly Elizabeth! I swear you’re a Brit, a throwback, you and your conflagrate them flower beds laid out in rows.