Four Souls: A Novel Read online

  “She is unwell,” said Testor, with a meaningful emphasis. I understood at once. A thick bolt of envy pierced me.

  “This means an heir,” I said in a neutral tone.

  “So it does.”

  I was quiet. I tried to sip my tea, but its sweetness choked me. Having never been one to bemoan my lot, I made no expression of acknowledgment one way or the other. I don’t think Mrs. Testor was of sufficient sensitivity to observe how I paled and trembled. I don’t think she understood at all that sadness ran me through like a sword. I don’t think she or anyone knew then, or ever will know, with what desperate eagerness I wanted a child. I took my leave, went out to the motorcar where my little dog, Diablo, sat curled on the passenger’s seat. He had long since stopped begging me for anything, the little tyrant. He gazed straight ahead as though anxious to get back and eat the food in his silver bowl. So I got in, behind the wheel, and drove him home.

  THE NEXT WORLD, of what shall consist its poisons and delights? Love in this world avoided me. And love’s issue, beyond all measure. Immersed in the saltless broth of my existence, I tried on moods. Here was Polly Elizabeth, coy in felt slippers and hair net. Here she was parading proud in a gown of Greek influence. Now a silly Fräulein holding her skirts above her head. As my sister made new friends in the more advanced artistic circles of our city, she also gained a plethora of models from which to choose. And so I was left posing in cobbled-together costumes with no one to paint me. Here was Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes. Now Saint Theresa of Avila undergoing her torment by the devil. At last I could only see Polly Elizabeth, in chains of foolishness. What was I, who was I, but one considered dangerous to others from the tedium of my company?

  I found myself returning with ever more frequency to the house of my former brother-in-law. I was drawn there by the prospect of a baby, as though by a force that overpowered my will. I came to the door with a pound cake and a visiting card.

  “Please bring it up to her,” I said to Mrs. Testor, who regarded me with the raw shock of someone who had seen the risen dead on the day of judgment.

  “Oh, shut your mouth, Nettie,” I said, and stood my ground. “Can’t I make it up with his new wife if I want to?”

  Mrs. Testor shrugged, her eyes still round, and placed the cake and my card right next to it on the silver tray I used to carry up to Placide’s studio. She brought the offering up the stairs. Came straight back down. The pound cake sat untouched. My card was turned over next to it. An eloquent rejection.

  “I won’t give up, Testor,” I said. “I shall return. Is she craving anything? Can you give me a hint?”

  Nettie Testor paused and bit her lip, struggling with some information. Where in the past I would have ordered her to tell it to me, now I mustered the patience to wait. I knew only humility on my part would unseal her lips. As I knew she would, Testor relented. She boiled a kettle of water, poured it into the brown teapot with the chipped spout, and while it steeped she told me that Fleur was having some difficulty carrying the child and there was concern she’d lose it. As Testor filled my cup, I was surprised to feel a sinking hollow in the pit of my stomach, and then a pang that made me shiver. I was suddenly anxious to return to my preciously assembled household library and consult the sections of my eugenic hygiene books that dealt with delicate pregnancies. I quickly drained my cup, thanked Testor, and told her I was going home to research the matter and find a cure.

  Overexertion, overexcitement, a fall, a blow. Any violent emotion, such as anger, sudden and overpowering joy, or fright. Running, dancing, horseback riding over rough roads. Great fatigue, lifting heavy weights, purgative medicines, and, of course, excessive intercourse. Straining at the stool. Hemorrhoids. Bathing in the ocean. Nursing. Tight lacing. Footbaths are dangerous and of course shower bath is too great a shock to the system. One should avoid strenuous coughing or weeping. One should try to suppress the tendency to violent sneezing by washing the ears with tepid salt water.

  There was more, much more to keeping a baby from falling out of the body before its term. I noted down every word.

  Once again, the next day, I stood at the door and waited for Testor to answer and let me in. She appeared, her broad face pallid and serious. Just as she opened the door, a cry arrested her attention. Her hands flew up around her face. She whirled. I stepped in after her and when she trundled rapidly upstairs, puffing like an engine, I sprang along close behind her. She was too distracted by the cry to really notice me. She fairly charged down the corridor.

  It was Fleur, of course. She had just experienced a short epoch of flooding, accompanied by sudden pains. Mauser was gone and Fantan with him, so there I was in a sudden position to take charge. I made the most of it.

  “Whiskey, fetch whiskey,” I ordered Testor, “and get the doctor, too.”

  In her panic, she obeyed by force of habit as I proceeded to gently coax Fleur to elevate her hips, the child’s cradle, on some pillows. I gave her the remedy my books had recommended for the stoppage of an early derangement of the womb. Perhaps she’d never drunk the stuff before. She took a huge gulp and choked on the fire.

  Slowly, slowly, I coached her, just a sip at a time and it will go down smoother.

  She was furious and frightened. Her face, against the starched pillowcase that I myself had embroidered, was the color of ashes. Her eyes were black with a desperate and anthracitic heat. She gripped the pillow, as though to squeeze it dead, her hands twisting. Her voice was hoarse as she knocked back the second glass of whiskey.

  “Help me!” she cried out.

  And straightaway, she caught my heart.

  To be needed by someone as strong as Fleur, as bold, as conscious, even though at first glance I had despised her. To be begged in a voice that God heard as well as I. To suddenly realize that if I could lay aside my small contempt, I might cherish her. I might be able to help her grow the child, the babe whom I wanted to live with a longing quite beyond my own selfish habits. By the time the whiskey had taken hold and her body quit attempting to expel the child, she had changed in my mind, but I didn’t yet know how.

  “CRUDE, but effective,” said the doctor when he saw the whiskey. “Continue the treatment as required. Don’t let her out of the bed.” He called me near again as he washed his hands.

  “I do not treat servants,” he said, flicking water from his hands, “or Indians.”

  I suppose that before this moment I might have agreed with him. I might have washed his hands for him with an obsequious little smile, and handed him a clean towel to pat them dry. But at the tone of his voice, some nerve in me was strangely yanked.

  “Oh? Oh? I will be certain to make her husband, John James Mauser, aware of your sentiments,” I told the doctor, in an unmistakable rage. My voice rose. “In turn, I am sure that he will make his known to all who serve with him on the hospital board—”

  But the man cut me off quite rudely by walking straight from the room without the pretense of a leave-taking. I went back into Fleur’s room right away and helped her to another sip of the spirits, then sat with her, reading aloud from a book of the poems of Lord Byron, until she slept.

  SO IT IS I who know as much of the truth of things as one can know. I who was privileged, who was driven to the side of a woman I’d once ordered to wash my clothes. I suppose it could be said that I was humbled, or enlarged. Some truer form of human regard had triumphed in me. The prospect of the child brought me to that. As her pregnancy continued precarious, I visited as often as I could. I worried about my distraction from Placide, but my sister barely noticed my absence and never asked my whereabouts, even when my visits grew so frequent that I spent more time in Fleur’s presence than I did in my own house.

  Now, to my surprise, I found it easy to be with Fleur. The room she had shared with Mauser, but now slept in alone, was very calm with its wallpaper of an eggshell brocade. The bed coverlet was made of old lace, folded down around her feet, and from that bed she watched the fire
wink on the ebony mantelpiece in which were emblazoned cockleshells, the carved faces of sea nymphs, and dancing goddesses. I found it brought me peace to sit with Fleur hour upon hour. She spoke little at first and never smiled, though I think she enjoyed the music of verse. Most often, she passed her hours in a blank weariness that had in it no hint of either hostility or resentment. When my voice grew hoarse from reading aloud, I crocheted blankets for the baby or sewed pieces of a tiny layette. When my eyes failed or my fingers cramped, I simply sat and watched the afternoon light pass across the walls.

  The shadows of the ash leaves as the sun moved behind them were very graceful, their movements hypnotic and sad. The radiance of late afternoon struck the fireplace and picked out the figures of the captive Graces. In that quiet, I reflected often on the house in which I’d passed my days. I had seen it raised from the beginning. I knew its natural provenance, as well as its present existence. I had watched John James Mauser build it for my sister, after all, and had been moved and impressed by the making of it.

  At the time, though I had sympathized in and even acted in protest at the treatment of the horses that dragged its great blocks of stone uphill, it had not occurred to me that humans were ill treated in the matter too. All of the materials, the fabric, all the raw stuff of our opulent shelter were taken from Fleur’s people. She described her natal lands and informed me of their rapine treatment at the hands of white men, at the hands of Mauser himself. As I sat in the room with the woman talking or dreaming in the bed, many thoughts came. It occurred to me to imagine her as a person—as a woman with family and feelings for them such as my own. I began to wonder who they were, and where she was from in actual truth and not the land of my misperceptions. And then, one day when she was half caught in sleep or in the whiskey the doctor prescribed and I spooned out by the hour, Fleur spoke. In a raving melancholy, she poured out language by the tub, all the time gazing straight into my eyes. Of course, I couldn’t understand a single word of her vagabond tongue, but I did know she was asking for my help. That was unmistakable. She began to weep. I put my hand on her forehead and stroked her brow until she grew calmer. Piece by piece, over the weeks and months, there then grew from such moments between us a connection. And from that connection, I am not ashamed to say it, there grew love.

  THE CHILD was born screaming and would not be soothed until I thought to dip my finger into the whiskey cup and lay it on his kitten’s tongue. Afterward, we painted Fleur’s nipples with it so that the child would suck, although, by then, as she continued her medicinal drinking, I suppose he imbibed plenty at the breast. For the first week, I slept in the cellar, in Fleur’s old bed, and raced up the stairs when hearing the faintest cries. The next week, I slept on a pallet on the floor of the nursery. Soon I had the closet. Then my old room back. Nursemaid, doctor, fictional aunt, slave to the tiny one, servant to the mother too, I was in my correct element. I did all I could for Fleur, supplied the antidote for any worry, the remedy for any need, subdued any craving. I was so thoroughly immersed in my role, and in the charming new life, that only later, a good three months along, did I begin to have an inkling of what was starting to happen.

  Fleur’s dullness and depletion, her sunk eye, yellowed skin, had begun to give me concern. I was slightly reassured when she rallied. She took charge of herself, rose from bed, began to walk and take air. But although I could see how her strength quickly improved, I also noticed that she had acquired a taste for the stuff that had arrested her labor. She would not be without a decanter of whiskey in any room, and she sipped it throughout the day. Though I never saw her visibly intoxicated, though she never slurred her talk or stumbled, it was clear that she had began to rely on the liquor and was lost without its golden fire.

  THESE WERE the happiest and the most requited times of my existence. The baby soft as butter, the blue-eyed little prince, was astonishingly like his father in coloration, and he was placid, either sweet or indifferent of temper. He started out thin and puling, but soon grew rolls and puckers, anklets and bracelets of silken fat. My continual presence at the house was accepted as long as I did not outstay my welcome, into the evening, but retired by the time John James Mauser returned for dinner. Still, I think that Mauser was amused at my enthusiasm for the boy, and perhaps sympathetic to my fervor, as it resembled his own. I found that I could sit in one place and simply stare at the baby without suffering one second of boredom or impatience. I’d never had the experience of this awed foolishness, this trance. I seemed quite brainless. I heard myself give out coos, hoots, burbles— noises I had never before uttered, animallike and almost desperate. Sometimes I gazed so long into the baby’s face that I forgot my own face. Or I touched the shining hands and forgot my own borders, melted skin through skin. As I made my way home each night, I had to remind myself that he was birthed of Fleur, belonged to Mauser, that I was nothing and no relation. Yet I had given away my own heart, and once that’s done there is no easy way to take it back.

  SEVEN

  Whiskey, Love, Linoleum

  Nanapush

  THE COUGHBALL of an owl is a packed lump of everything the bird can’t digest—bones, fur, teeth, claws, and nails. An owl tears apart its catch, gulps it down whole, and nourishes itself on blood and flesh. The residue, the undissolvable, fuses. In the small, light, solid pellet, the frail skull of a finch, femur of a mouse, cleft necklace of vertebrae, seed-fine teeth, gray gopher and rabbit fur. A perfect compression of being. What is the essence, the soul? my Jesuit teachers used to ask of their students. What is the irreducible? I answer, what the owl pukes. That is also the story—what is left after the events in all their juices and chaos are reduced to the essence. The story— all that time does not digest.

  Fleur left the reservation. Of all that happened day to day, all the ins and outs of her existence, we have what came of the accumulation. We have the story.

  The coughball itself is also a valuable find. Bad omen, but good medicine. It cures headaches, too much monthly blood, fevers, flux, sore feet, love. Fleur never used it, she never needed any medicine to snag her men. They fell her way like notched trees. She treated them that way, too, and burned them with her heat or used them for her purpose. Which is how, the second time Fleur Pillager went off the reservation, she toppled Minneapolis society and made a son. But her power got to be too much for her. She got careless. Too bold. She should have known that it is wrong to bear a child for any reason but to surrender your body to life.

  Fleur was what you might call stingy with her spirit gifts, and so she didn’t get much back from other humans. Revenge, she wanted that. And also restoration. Don’t forget. She wanted her land back and if she couldn’t have the trees she wanted some equivalent justice for their loss. She was so concentrated on her plan that she could not receive. Not much love, is what I’m saying. She wasn’t loved. Eyah! Of course there was Eli, but there I rest my case. Yes, she was passioned. Men made brainless fools out of themselves in pursuit. They adored her and feared her in equal measure, as Eli did, and as Mauser did now.

  We are all imperfect in our love for one another. That is why we turn to that kind spirit who created us. Gizhe Manito tries to protect us but sometimes fails, like any parent. Yet this spirit does not stop loving us. That is the one to whom Fleur turned, I am sure of it, to argue against like a parent when everything was taken. Everything, of course, except her young daughter, Lulu.

  No, she did not give her first child away. It was not as they insist. Fleur merely took the girl off to hide her the way a wolf hides a pup when she must do battle to protect her standing or confront a danger. That’s how it was. Lulu was to be hidden in the government school, safe. Not left, not forgotten. This is what she did.

  SHE HAD COME to kill and humiliate and take back her land, which he had stolen so carelessly that he wasn’t aware of it, but then Mauser made himself her dog anyway and wanted her in such an absence of self that she put aside her knife. Whatever tenderness Fleur owned at the time was
attached to her child. What love she felt was buried underneath a tree marked by a red flag. Her love was bones, or bound up in loss. No man had truly felt it. So when Mauser bared his heart and throat he knew, perhaps, the wolf in her couldn’t kill him on instinct and the woman in her could not destroy him out of sheer intrigue.

  He would have broken into a drenching, clear sweat, but ever since Fleur had returned his body to him, he had exercised increasing control over all of its jerks and spasms and eccentric twitches. She had healed him in order to wreck him in good condition, which to her was the only honorable way a Pillager could take satisfaction in vengeance. But healing a man is dangerous. I was going to say a man like Mauser. But perhaps it is dangerous for a woman to heal any man at all.

  He desired her and she grew accustomed to her power. Maybe she desired him, though she would never admit it to me. Some women like a smart man, and others prefer a fool. Speaking as both, I can tell you it doesn’t matter if you can convince a woman you have something to hide.

  So perhaps that was how John James Mauser did it. He threw out a net of questions, uncertainties, riddles, and Fleur dove into it, curious as an otter. She was snagged. She would be dragged along the bottom. She would be weakened and changed. His desire would exhaust her, and the high life temporarily fascinate her with its rich swirl of hilarious chimookomaanag doings and foods. She would be dazzled more than anything by the mounds of smoked white sturgeon at the party given in her honor at their wedding. For many years afterward, she talked of it. Platters of that most exquisite fish, dishes large as wagon wheels, piled high.