Four Souls: A Novel

  My brother-in-law, John Mauser, was the cause and perpetrator—I should say the victim as well, though he surely would not countenance that statement. After his war year, my brother-in-law had acquired a specific and demanding need for fresh-pressed clean linen. He sweat, to put it indelicately. Sweat. Once, twice, then three or four times a night, his man-nurse, Fantan, was required to change him from the soaked skin out, to strip the bed down and make it up fresh, with sheets starched smooth and scented with sandalwood. Then, and only then, could my brother-in-law fall asleep. It got to be so we couldn’t keep up with the demand. And although quite a number of doctors had attempted to solve the riddle of his symptoms, their lack of progress in other matters quite convinced me that, in regard to this problem, looking to the future was wisest. The sweating would be permanent. And so I was anxious to hire. I wanted a woman specifically to launder, to live in the basement and use the soapstone tubs and iron taps to scald and renew the sheets as Fantan carted them down, and up, and down again from my brother-in-law’s closed chamber.

  “Good,” she answered, when I had explained the position.

  “I’m most pleased.” I conveyed my satisfaction with professional rigor, although inside I was vastly relieved. I asked how soon she might be able to begin.

  “Now,” she said.

  The emphatic answer filled me with hope. Though she spoke almost not at all, the fact that she understood English was thereby established. Also, the linen had collected. Below my feet, in the basement, a pile that would have scorched my mother’s heart lay twisted and towering over the scrub boards and wringers.

  “We have a hot water heater and pump, a Maytag, a system that Mrs. Testor will teach you to use.”

  I offered a proper sum of payment, to which she nodded. Then I told her that although she might hear Fantan occasionally address me by my Christian name, and although out of acceptance of his mental infirmity I’d given up correcting him every time he did so, I absolutely required that she address me as Miss Gheen.

  Again, she nodded. How much she understood, I cannot tell. I pointed to myself, tapping my chest.

  “Miss Gheen, not Elizabeth.”

  “Not Elizabeth,” she repeated, looking straight into my eyes. Not Elizabeth it was after that.

  I SUPPOSE it was my fault, then, for not being more specific, but the look she gave me wasn’t covered in Miss Katherine Hammond’s courses on the hiring and retaining of help. I could not in honesty have categorized the gaze as impertinence, a thing to be dealt with in a spirit of “calm, firm dispatch.” None of Fantan’s melancholy or Mrs. Testor’s occasional sneers were evident. Perhaps it is true that Indians are unintelligible, to the civilized mind I mean, as far removed in habit of thought and behavior as wild wolves from bred hounds. That comparison is one my brother-in-law made, to opposite effect I believe, when speaking of the people among whom he lived in the northern wilds for a time in his youth. Although, as I’ve since learned, he plundered their land and took advantage of young women, he still had a higher opinion of their intellect and capacities than I. Soon enough, my views on their talents—for duplicity at least—would change.

  The pupil so dark it matched the iris. The gaze a steady beam that shook the air between us with a subtle motion. It was a curious feeling, almost as though I’d been gazed upon by a predator and assessed. Through a strong cage, however. I was once again in charge. As Mother would have, I turned and swept out the massive door expecting her to follow, her in her wood-smoke tatters, her with that piteous bundle. By Monday morning I could order a uniform made up for her. A black dress. An apron, with pinstripes, small gussets, a bow to be tied just so at the small of her back.

  Past the kitchen and pantry, past Mrs. Testor, whose eyes flicked back and forth at the sight of my captive. Mrs. Testor clapped at her bosom with one raw pink hand as though to beat back a fluttering bird. We descended. A pleasant stairway led to the base level of the house, a feature of our dwelling in which Mother took her pride. You see, it was her absolute conviction that from the ground up details mattered. She never did things simply for appearance. The interfacing of a dress, the trimmed hem, the well-organized interior of a closet, the underpinnings of a cake. Fresh ingredients, pristine undergarments, a cellar so clean and light it was a pleasure, no, really, an honor for our help to live there, these were things important to the late Demeter Hewes Gheen. She always had the tires of our automobile washed before an important engagement in town. Before a gathering in our own house, she had the backs of the clocks and the hung portraits dusted upstairs, even in rooms no one would visit. Down here, the rough stone walls, whitened with a lime base paint, sparkled in the slanting sheets of sun admitted by the generous windows built into the foundation. The floor was brick, laid with runners cut from old carpet.

  “Mind the steam pipes,” I said, pointing out the scalding copper pipes that ran from the boilers and climbed up two, three floors to the topmost encircled little tower, where Placide maintained her artist’s studio. “No touch”—I gestured, wrung my finger, made a face—“very hot!”

  Her face grew solemn, as though she understood.

  “Voilà!” I opened a small, thick door. “Your living quarters.”

  She was gratified, I could see right off, manifestly pleased by what she saw. The room was austere but comfortable, peaceable and pleasantly dim. The bedding, several blankets deep, boasted not one but two pillows, and a quilt. Beside the bed, not that she’d make use of it for its intended purpose, stood a writing table, the shut drawer containing a Bible, and an old-fashioned lamp with beads and tassels. A cushioned chair, the rose-patterned sleeves polished thin with use, took up a corner. There was a window through which, as we looked up, we saw the face of Fantan, absorbed and serene, as he stooped to briefly watch us.

  “We’ll just draw these little curtains,” I said, running my hand along the brass rod. “Don’t you mind him!”

  But Fantan’s interest did not cause the slightest wobble of composure in this Pillager woman, who smoothed one long-fingered dark hand along the quilt and then deposited her bundle at the baseboard—where her head would rest, according to Mrs. Testor’s later testimony, as in Fleur’s mind the bed was incorrectly situated.

  A SCENE, days later. I am posing for my sister, who is painting me as Nebuchadnezzar. To oblige her talent I have taken on hosts of mythological disguises over the years, and her studio is filled with my representation and figure in classical and biblical settings. She is working on a large-scale triptych called Knowledge and Godlessness, in which my face appears as almost every scowling pagan from Marx to Salomé, “occluded by veils.” Mother was Semiramus. I am desperate to scratch my chin.

  “I must see to this new laundry woman.” My fingers steal beneath the gray horsehair beard of the troubled hesiarch.

  “Your crown! You’ve tipped it! I wanted it just so,” scolds Placide. She wears her dark blond hair smooth to the head, in a simple cut, so as not to detract from what Katherine Hammond called “the purity of brow.” It was thirteen years ago, at Miss Hammond’s school, that Placide first began to realize her vocation. Painting china plates was how it started. Now, each Wednesday and Friday at noon, the painting teacher comes from the university and the two seclude themselves for hours, engrossed in an intense exploration of form and color.

  “I’m tired. I have so much to do.”

  “Oh well, then.” Placide bites back on her words, as if to tell me that I have once again shown my true philistine stripe, my low valuation of her talent. She thinks of very little other than the unfolding of this fascinating side of herself, this vibrational urge, as she calls it. Brother-in-law, who makes no secret of his opinions, who called Miss Hammond’s vital lessons on deportment “simpering instructions,” and referred to my mother’s discriminations and opinions as “one long swoon of platitudes,” makes short shrift of the painting teacher and the efforts of Placide. I have tried to make up for his lack of kindness by remaining still for hours,
sometimes in the most excruciating attitudes, but nothing quite replaces a husband’s approval.

  “Go, go,” says Placide, weary and absorbed.

  I pull off the beard, put the paste crown in its hatbox, and am just about to untie brother-in-law’s quilted satin smoking jacket when I hear a sort of low howling begin, muffled and irregular. It issues from the south side of the house, the glass porch where brother-in-law sits on fine mornings and takes the strengthening light. I am up in a flash, racing downstairs for the opium bottle. My sister’s husband has little physical reserve left these days, and I must dole the medicine out according to the doctor’s orders. Fantan would simply pour the stuff down his throat and keep him stupefied, as in fact the poor man wishes. I am more judicious. At these times, all through my brother-in-law’s wasted limbs a kind of electrical fury proceeds, each nerve connected and lit up, each muscle pinched and bound. His suffering is a mystery, positively terrible to watch. He flails and runs at the mouth. He loses consciousness, whimpers like a baby or whines, and by the crablike force of his convulsed limbs makes his way under furniture, hides where he can. We believe he suffers from a neuralgia, perhaps the hitherto undetected result of deadly chlorine gas, worsening over the months.

  I am, to my mind, adept at dealing with brother-in-law though he always seems to hate the fact that I’ve seen him and touched him in his state rather than allowing Fantan to administer the medicine. There is no doubt he’ll fly into a rage at me, later, but I’ve locked the medicine away in a drawer just to be sure it isn’t given on the sly. In that, my mother failed. She should have made certain long ago that brother-in-law’s deterioration was monitored—not by that strange and sorry scarecrow, but by herself. Since I’ve taken over brother-in-law’s treatment, Fantan says he’s worse, but I say that’s the illusive quality of progress. Things always seem grimmest before they vastly improve. I walk into the solarium with the bottle and the spoon, but I am met with an unexpected sight.

  Speechless for a moment, I can do no more than stare.

  It is the savage woman I’ve recently hired to scrub clothes, bent over brother-in-law, I don’t know how to say it, like some kind of bird. Hawk-winged and territorial, her brown skirt spread, the apron bows starched and peaked in the back like a cocked white tail, she has him laid out flat. She’s working him over, each limb. Obviously, somehow, she has quieted an arm and a leg on one side of him and now she is kneading on his thigh like the dough of a bread. His left arm pounds monotonously on the parquet tiles, beating out a rhythm I fear will break the bone until she catches the wrist and then with no waste in motion seems to wring the muscles smooth in one twist, like squeezing dry a shirt, so that all of a sudden he is calm and limp. His breath floods in and out of his chest, one huge sigh then another, and now Fantan, kneeling at my brother-in-law’s head, carefully opens the jaw and removes his own two thick, purpled fingers. He has thrust them between the teeth in lieu of a rolled cloth, for fear that in the throes of his spell my brother-in-law should bite off his own tongue.

  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.

  THREE

  Medicine

  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.

  FROM 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.